Rob here: It’s a challenge to summarize in a few words Hideaway’s Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System (CACTUS) theory, but here’s my latest attempt:
- modernity depends on many non-renewable resources
- new resources must continuously be extracted from the earth’s crust to replace those burned or lost to decay, and because 100% recycling is not economical nor technically feasible for most resources
- reserve quality declines as non-renewable resources are extracted because they are finite, and because we consume the best first
- therefore, the energy, materials, and technology complexity used for resource extraction must increase to compensate for falling reserve quality to maintain a given extraction rate
- increasing civilization scale accelerates the development of higher extraction technology complexity
- increasing civilization scale increases the efficiency of resource use
- increasing civilization scale requires growth in non-renewable resource extraction
- therefore, increasing civilization scale BOTH enables and requires non-renewable resource flows to increase
- therefore, many complex interdependent self-reinforcing positive feedback loops collaborate to grow civilization quickly
- eventually, a physics limit is reached that prevents one or more non-renewable resource flows from increasing, which triggers a cascade of interdependent self-reinforcing negative feedback loops to collapse civilization’s scale and complexity
- therefore, modernity will be a short-lived rapidly growing and rapidly collapsing phenomenon anywhere that it emerges in the universe
- we have hit several limits to resource extraction growth and increasingly violent world affairs reflect stresses in a system preparing to collapse
- therefore, we are privileged to be alive to witness a rare peak of what is possible in the universe
Today’s essay by Hideaway takes a deep dive into points 5 & 6, the relationships between scale, efficiency, and complexity, and provides an explanation for point 11, why modernity is behaving like a supernova.
Enough fooling around with CACTUS limericks, let’s do some serious CACTUS math…
For me, coming across the scaling laws was like a bolt of lightening that connected everything about the complexity trap humanity has fallen into, and motivated me to research everything I could find about scaling laws and their relevance to all systems.
I knew that modern civilization couldn’t continue after fossil fuels because the EROEI of alternatives and nuclear was too low when taking the full wide boundary approach.
However, there was always the possibility of something new, or more improvements to existing technologies, that might allow modernity to continue, despite the fact that entropy and dissipation are real, and that lower ore grades require more energy to extract the same quantity of minerals and metals, and that we live on a finite planet.
Ingenuity, innovation, and agency are the reasons usually given for why limits don’t apply to for humans. I will show why the scaling laws override all claims that there are no limits.
The topic of how scaling laws will influence our future deserves a large book. This essay is as short as I could make it while still getting across important concepts.
I have used A.I. to help construct the tables and a few times used it to make some points concisely instead of me rambling on too long, so any change in writing style is where I’ve used A.I. to write the point concisely.
As you’re reading, if something is not making sense, wait for the “pivot”, because it didn’t make sense initially to me either.
I learnt a bit about biology scaling laws back in my Uni days many decades ago, however my more recent studies has been on how urban settlements also abide to scaling laws, with different rates than biology, and with some additional rules not seen in biology.
For mammals, as the size of the species increases, food intake also increases, but a doubling of size only leads to a 75% increase in food intake or metabolic rate. This is known as Kleiber’s law. The less specific observation that animals become more metabolically efficient as they grow in size is called the power law, hypometric scaling, or sub-linear scaling.
Plotting mammal species metabolic rate versus size on logarithmic scales results in a straight line with a slope less that 1.
The reason given for efficiency growing with size is usually the mathematical and geometric nature of the networks that distribute nutrients, and carry away waste and heat, as stated in the image above.
These networks are the circulatory system, the nervous system, the lymphatic system, the bone structure, sight and hearing connected to the nervous system, and others I may have missed.
In biology, the study of how the growth of structures and systems is influenced by size is known as allometry.
Of interest to me is that social insect colonies, like ants and bees, also demonstrate scaling laws similar to individual organisms, often also to the ¾ power, though not for everything.
Professor Geoffrey West, a physicist, has done a lot of research about how cities look and act like an organism, with economies of scale, and similar fractal internal networks. His research, and the research of his PhD students, determined that scaling laws for cities are slightly different than those in biology.
In human settlements characterized as ‘urban’ centres, a doubling in size results in an 85% increase in many aspects like road surface area, power line length, number of gas stations, etc., all the physical type attributes. Other aspects, like population density in megacities, scale at the 75% power law.
Interestingly though, we are not entirely as efficient as nature, that mostly scales at a 75% for a doubling in mass.
There are some aspects of cities that scale at greater than 100% for a doubling in size, the socioeconomic aspects, as Geoffrey West explains:
“The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita. That law seems to be the same in all of the data we can get at. It is a really interesting relationship, and it’s very reminiscent of scaling laws in biology. However, when we looked at socioeconomic quantities—quantities that have no analogue in biology, like wages, patents produced, crime, number of police, etcetera—we found that unlike everything we’d seen in biology, cities scale in a super-linear fashion: The exponent was bigger than 1, about 1.15. That means that when you double the size of the city, you get more than double the amount of both good and bad socioeconomic quantities—patents, aids cases, wages, crime, and so on.”
More can be learned by reading Prof. West’s book “Scale”, or by watching one or two of his YouTube videos.
Two aspects of scaling are massively relevant to our existing civilization: the efficiency gains that resulted from growing towns and cities, around the world, compared if we had stayed a rurally based population, with the same population.
Take an example of a material, let’s call it “K”, it could be bitumen for roads, or wire in overhead transmissions, or bricks in shops or commercial premises, etc., any physical attribute that has scaled at around 85% for every doubling of population. A city that has grown over the last 100 plus years from 100,000 to a current 3.2M has had 5 doublings in population size, while “K” that originally had 85,000 tonnes used for infrastructure has grown to 1.842M tonnes of use with the same doublings of population. It’s still massive growth, but if the growth had matched population growth on a one for one basis, as in scaled at 1, it would have grown to 2.7M tonnes of use. Think of all the energy and materials saved by using only 1.8M tonnes of “K” instead of 2.7M tonnes for the same population if it had scaled a 1:1 instead of sub-linearly at 0.85:1.
While this sub-linear scaling for materials and energy use has been an advantage for efficiency in the cities, it almost always goes unnoticed in our modern world as there is still a vast increase in energy and material use, plus cities are huge vacuums of resources from their hinterlands and we tend to focus just on the increased use of both energy and materials, while not realising the efficiency gains in the background.
Where do all the efficiency gains come from, apart from the usual excuse of human ingenuity? In the case of scaling laws, it’s the other side of the coin. With human settlements we have super-linear scaling or hypermetric scaling (above 1 around 1.15) for just about every aspect of socio economic human interaction. Whether it’s ideas, innovation, patents, arts, wages, GDP, money, debt, research, R&D expenditure, telecommunication volume, social interactions, or even walking speed!!
However, we also get hyperlinear scaling of around the same 1.15 or 115% for every doubling of the population for crime rates, disease spread, police, traffic congestion, pollution, and waste.
Pivot 1!!
I want to stop here for a second, because the theory and research findings, suddenly didn’t make sense to me!!
How can urban areas/cities of which a huge proportion of humans now live in compared to prior historic times be more energy efficient at the rate of 85% for every doubling in their population, when overall energy use has grown by something like 30 times while the population has grown by 10-12 times, in other words a super-linear scaling of overall energy use?
I track this inconsistency back to the definition of urban areas/cities. What they are measuring has been the residential and old commercial part of cities or central local government areas, where all the people mostly live, not the entire metropolitan area including all the industrial areas and ports!!
The following map/diagram, is a heat map of a city in Northern Italy, Padua. It doesn’t matter which one, as it shows the entropy of a city, but also has where the old city centre is located compared to today’s energy use. Notice how number 6 is the old city centre, which has had the population double and double again over time, where the huge sublinear scaling of an 85% increase in energy use, infrastructure etc. has occurred for every doubling of human population, even though many of those people might work in the Industrial area number 1, that is excluded from the calculations of energy use for the ‘city’. The cities physical limits stay constant in all the research.
It doesn’t matter how the research is not that accurate for overall growth as portrayed by Prof West in so many videos. It is still accurate and important for the efficiency gains we’ve had for where people live and interact.
It also makes a lot of logical sense, as people living in high rise smaller apartments have obvious heating and cooling savings, material savings in construction, less street area per person etc., compared to those living in stand alone housing in rural areas. Plus less distance to the supermarket, or restaurant, or university, or office block, etc..
End pivot.
Back to scaling laws that definitely apply in nature such as in Kleiber’s Law described above. What if we took the entirety of human civilization as a whole, as no city in the modern world can build, exist or operate without inputs from across the world, whereas this might have been restricted to the local area 600 years ago, so we must accommodate for this massive change.
The character of cities has evolved from originally relying solely upon their hinterland thousands of years ago, to being totally dependent upon areas outside their hinterland today.
Using total human population doublings compared to energy and materials growth we get the following over the last few doublings.
The Long-Term Scaling of the “Bloom”
| Population Doubling | Approx. Dates | Total Energy Increase | Scaling Exponent |
| 500M – 1B | ~1500 – 1804 | ~1.3x to 1.5x | ~0.4 to 0.6 (Hypometric) |
| 1B – 2B | 1804 – 1927 | ~5x to 6x | ~2.3 to 2.6 (Extreme Hyper-linear) |
| 2B – 4B | 1927 – 1974 | ~4.7x | ~2.2 (Extreme Hyper-linear) |
| 4B – 8B | 1974 – 2022 | ~2.5x | ~1.3 (Hyper-linear) |
| Population Milestone | Approx. Year | Total Material Use (Gt/yr) | Global “Metabolism” per Person |
| 500 Million | ~1500 | ~1.0 Gt | ~2 tonnes |
| 1 Billion | ~1804 | ~2.5 Gt | ~2.5 tonnes |
| 2 Billion | ~1927 | ~7.0 Gt | ~3.5 tonnes |
| 4 Billion | ~1974 | ~30 Gt | ~7.5 tonnes |
| 8 Billion | ~2022 | ~100+ Gt | ~12.5 tonnes |
Notice how every aspect of energy and materials use is super linear scaled since the start of the fossil fuel era. If I was writing up chapters of a book, I’d break this down further for say a 15-20% increases in population and compared to above energy and materials use.
I’ve also been working on breaking it all up into other categories like net energy use, or total materials moved, that accounts for all the extra earth moving from mining 1% ore grades instead of 10% ore grades etc. None of them really change the big picture shown by just energy and materials above, except for the net energy where we are going backwards. By necessity though, net energy calculations are not possibly fully accurate, but the trend is what’s important…
Net Energy vs. Population Doublings (Estimates)
| Population Doubling | Total Energy (EJ) | Estimated EROI | Net Energy (Surplus) | Energy System Cost |
| 1B – 2B | 20 – 100 | 40 – 80 | ~5.1x Increase | ~2.5x Increase |
| 2B – 4B | 100 – 260 | 80 – 40 | ~2.6x Increase | ~5.2x Increase |
| 4B -8B | 260 – 600 | 40 – 15 | ~2.2x Increase | ~6.2x Increase |
Notice how net surplus energy after taking out estimated energy cost of energy is still super-linear in scaling. I therefore took it down to the increases in net energy for every 15% increase in population from more recently, from the end of exponential oil use growth.
Net Energy vs. 15% Population Growth (Post-1974)
Figures based on a weighted average global EROI that includes the shift from conventional oil (100:1) to unconventional (15:1) and renewables (<5:1 in full-system terms).
| Window | Pop. Growth | Net Energy Increase | Energy System “Tax” |
| 1974 – 1986 | +15.3% | ~24% | Baseline |
| 1986 – 1998 | +15.1% | ~19% | ~1.4x |
| 1998 – 2010 | +15.2% | ~12% | ~2.8x |
| 2010 – 2022 | +15.0% | ~4% | ~4.2x |
The energy tax is just the growing cost of gaining energy, but the obvious take from above is that since around 1998 while population has kept growing, net energy has not kept pace and the lag between them is growing. Meanwhile ore grades continue to decline and energy use to gain metals and minerals is accelerating. Calvo and Mudd 2016, have shown that a 30% increase in copper production came with a 46% increase in energy use for that production, which means falling ore grades, remoteness, deepness of mines, harder ore indexes have overcome any efficiency gains. This is another part of the story though, so I’ll leave it or this will be a book.
Pivot 2 !!
What about the super scaling aspects of human civilization, how do they fit into the big picture??
One aspect of super scaling of anything is that as you move forward in time at some point super-scaling has to reach infinity as it’s exponential growth.
Then there is the vast difference between the super-scaling that happened as populations doubled in urban areas and towns for all socioeconomic metrics, like innovation, GDP, patents, research, R&D expenditure, wages + salaries, wealth creation, higher degrees in specialities, information exchange, cultural output as in restaurants, theatres, creative venues, along with all the negatives of crime, police numbers, disease spread, waste, land rents and taxes, compared to physical super-linear scaling of materials and energy use. The former are all man made concepts, the latter have physical limits.
In the long term it’s impossible for these to reach infinity, so we know it simply cannot go on forever.
We also changed the scaling rules, instead of a town or city growing organically, we made the world pretty much as one, for a lot of our human interactions and storytelling.
We created the internet where communication is available instantly around the world. We have forums all over the place for sharing of all types of stories, YouTube videos for learning skills, or sharing new ideas on every possible range of topics. We have online journals in most specialist areas where a new article can be instantly shared around the world. All this accelerates the super-linear scaling of every socio economic metric.
The table below shows the rate of increase in our collective complexity, in other words the stories we tell ourselves.
Global Cumulative Growth per 15% Population Step (1970–2024)
| Population Milestone | Year (Approx.) | 15% Pop. Step | Global GDP (% Increase) | Scientific Papers (% Increase) | Administrative Loading (% Increase) |
| 3.7 Billion | 1970 | Base | Base | Base | Base |
| 4.25 Billion | 1978 | +15% | +44% | +40% | +35% |
| 4.9 Billion | 1986 | +15% | +31% | +43% | +28% |
| 5.6 Billion | 1994 | +15% | +28% | +50% | +32% |
| 6.5 Billion | 2005 | +16% | +46% | +100% | +55% |
| 7.5 Billion | 2017 | +15% | +40% | +100% | +62% |
| 8.0 Billion | 2024 | +7% | +18% | +70% | +40% |
I’ve included GDP as just a story we tell ourselves, just like every scientific paper (whether true or not!), plus every other nonphysical aspect of our modern world. We cannot live on these stories, we need food, shelter, clothing, etc., and we can earn money by telling these stories to each other and use money (another story humans tell each other!) to buy food, shelter and clothing.
However we don’t tell all these stories in a vacuum. Take the increased administration. This takes people, buildings, heating, air conditioning, paper, computers, etc. I can look at my local government in a rural area where over 40 years ago there was a shire secretary, a building inspector, a health inspector and a couple of administrative assistants. For pretty much the same population as back then, the administration has around 60 people, all using energy and physical resources.
End pivot…
Back to scaling laws in the natural world.
In the natural world, super-linear scaling is extremely rare, while sub-linear scaling occurs in many systems.
As noted early, nearly all life forms have a type of inherent sub-linear scaling and can exist for extremely long periods of time. The ecosystems the lifeforms collectively form also have this sub-linear scaling.
We also have sub-linear scaling in physical non-life systems, that are also extremely long lasting. For example a river length extends by around 0.6 for the increase in size of the river basin (Hack’s Law).
Then there is the surface volume law for planets and stars where the energy loss of a sphere is only 0.67 times the increase in volume (radius squared compared to radius cubed). This is why a large planet like Earth stays hot for billions of years, while a small satellite like our Moon cools down and “dies” quickly. The larger the mass, the more efficient the “insulation.” (more on stars later!!)
The dissipation of energy in large-scale fluids (like the wind or ocean currents) follows Kolmogorov scaling. The energy contained in small eddies scales sub-linearly relative to the energy in large-scale flows.
Also on the largest possible scale, the way matter is distributed in the universe follows sub-linear fractal patterns. The number of galaxies found within a sphere of radius scales with an exponent of roughly 2.0 (instead of 3.0). The universe isn’t a solid block of matter; it’s a web of filaments. This “under-filling” of space is sub-linear which allows gravity to balance the expansion of the universe without everything collapsing into a single point.
I could but won’t go on. Every one of the above sub-linear scaling laws in the natural world is a huge area of research by itself, with books and high-level research (stories by humans) about it all, if anyone is slightly interested.
Super-linear scaling is rare and only tends to last a short period of time.
In the natural world of life, super-linear scale events are things like cancer. A tumor’s metabolic demand and growth rate scale super-linearly relative to its mass. Because it scales faster than the host’s ability to provide energy (the sub-linear “pipes”), it eventually starves the host and itself. It is a “singularity” that ends in the death of the system.
Then there are outbreaks like a locust plague or an algal bloom. When a “pulse” of energy (like nitrogen/phosphorus runoff) hits water, the algae population scales super-linearly. They use the excess energy to replicate at a rate that ignores the usual “checks and balances.”
When environmental triggers (like sudden rain) occur, locusts undergo a “phase change” from solitary to gregarious. Their interaction density scales super-linearly, triggering a massive, coordinated population explosion.
Algal blooms grow so fast (super-linear demand) that they consume all the dissolved oxygen in the water (sub-linear supply). They literally suffocate the environment that supports them. A locust plague consumes every green thing in its path. It is a “vacuum” of energy that strips the landscape faster than the landscape can regenerate.
Because these processes are super-linear, they cannot reach a “steady state.” They always end in a Finite-Time Collapse:
The Algal Crash: Once the nutrients are gone or the oxygen is depleted, the algae die off en masse. This creates a “dead zone”—a state of high entropy and total system failure.
The Locust Die-off: Once the swarm runs out of food or hits a geographical barrier, the population collapses. They simply starve or revert to a solitary, low-energy state.
Interestingly, locust plagues are triggered by information. When locusts’ hind legs are touched enough times in a crowded environment, it triggers a hormonal shift. This is exactly like socioeconomic scaling. The “interaction density” of the crowd changes the behaviour of the individual to prioritize runaway growth over individual survival.
Non-life natural systems.
Super-linear scaling happens in things like nuclear fission. In a prompt critical state, the number of neutrons scales super-linearly with time.
In chemical explosions, the rate of reaction increases as heat is released, which in turn increases the rate of reaction.
The Outcome is a state of high entropy and energy dissipation. It eventually “exhausts” the kinetic energy of the flow unless more energy is constantly pumped in.
Back to stars.
Inside the core, the nuclear fusion rate scales super-linearly with the mass of the star. As a star’s size gets bigger, the internal pressure and temperature spike, causing it to burn fuel at an astronomical rate. This is the “Live Fast, Die Young” reality.
Earlier I mentioned that star’s surface area cooled at a sub-linear rate which is also true and hence a conflict. The reason stars of large magnitude are so unstable is specifically to do with this conflict of 2 scaling laws.
The instability of massive stars stems from a fundamental mismatch in how gravity and pressure scale as a star grows (‘grows’ means comparing stars of different initial masses, as they don’t grow like a plant, etc.). While a star’s mass (and its inward gravitational pull) increases with its volume, the outward radiation pressure required to counter that gravity increases far more aggressively, proportional to the fourth power of temperature (T4). In these giants, light becomes the dominant structural support rather than gas, creating a “squishy,” delicate balance where the outward push of photons nearly overcomes the inward pull of gravity. This forces the star to operate at the Eddington Limit, where it becomes so volatile that it frequently sheds its own mass in violent eruptions or pulses, eventually leading to a catastrophic structural failure when the core can no longer sustain the furious energy output required to stay inflated, as in supernova explosion.
Enough of large stars, there are books written about all this, suffice to say that having 2 different scaling laws applying at the same time make them very unstable.
Finally, let’s put it all together and get to the reason you’re probably reading this essay.
Human civilization has aspects of both sub-linear scaling like most life forms, and super-linear scaling like very few life forms and physical processes in the universe.
When did humans show the first signs of super-scaling? The answer might surprise some, but it was back in our hunter-gathering days, when there was enough social interaction of early religions that allowed the building of such places as Göbeklitepe in Turkey or Pivot Point in the U.S.A. Though super-scaling really took off with the towns and city states that developed with agriculture.
Every one of these city states, though, ended up collapsing as the growth in the socio-economic sphere of complexity outgrew the surrounding supply of energy and materials. Every anthropologist has their own description of exactly what happened with city states and their collapses, but they just about always stick to ‘human’ factors and certainly don’t embrace falling EROEI, and diminishing returns on materials, as playing an important role.
Prof Joseph Tainter, certainly does cover the increasing complexity of administration or problem solving, which acts as a tax on the prosperity of the culture, but doesn’t quite go as far as attributing a super-scaling aspect to this problem solving.
Fast forward to today’s civilization, where the complexity is growing at a growing rate.
With the help of A.I. I’ve created the following table…
Complexity Growth per 15% Population Addition
Statistics based on proxies including regulatory volume, R&D expenditure, and global supply chain nodes.
| 15% Pop. Window | Approx. Years | Complexity Growth (%) | Scaling Ratio | Major Driver |
| Window 1 | 1974 – 1982 | ~28% | 1.8x | Early Automation / Fuel Efficiency |
| Window 2 | 1982 – 1991 | ~42% | 2.8x | Personal Computing / Global Debt |
| Window 3 | 1991 – 2001 | ~65% | 4.3x | The Internet / Just-in-Time Logistics |
| Window 4 | 2001 – 2012 | ~88% | 5.9x | Carbon-Silicon Fusion / Social Media |
| Window 5 | 2012 – 2024 | ~112% | 7.5x | AI / High-Tech Governance (ESG) |
Everyone that has been around for enough decades, intuitively knows the above to be true in every facet of their lives. If you want to build a nuclear power plant, or a shed in your backyard, or sell some produce at a market, anywhere in the Western World, there are layers of more rules and regulations compared to a few decades ago.
Back when we bought our farm, if you wanted to put up an agricultural shed, you just built it. Now in 2026 you require a planning permit ($cost), which requires different experts to perform tests to make sure the land isn’t too steep, and the ground has the geotechnical strength to support the shed, plus bushfire overlays, environmental overlays, vegetation management overlays, etc. Then you apply for the building permit ($cost), that another expert must make sure all the engineering calculations, colour of building, appropriate materials, etc. are used. Then if you want to use the shed for any commercial purposes, more sets of rules come into play ($larger costs).
The above table, is just a best guestimate, but there are different actual statistics that back it up, like reports on ESG rules and regulations growth over the last 25 years, etc.
I’ve lost count of the number of politicians that promise if they are elected then they will cut the red tape for ….. (name your own businesses, companies, level of govt, etc) but it just doesn’t happen on any scale, as all rules, regulations, extra complexity are about ‘helping’ people or making everything ‘safer’ for workers, public, school kids, nurses, farmers, the poor, the homeless, the environment, the whales, the dolphins, the rare double breasted red herring, etc, etc, etc.
Where did this more recent explosion in the super-linear scaling of complexity come from? It’s easily accounted for by the internet that has made the social interactions of the whole world as if we were one large super city. Ideas, knowledge, concepts, stories, research papers all are instantly available around the world once posted online. Anyone here not think that a new set of rules or a tax thought up in Timbuktu won’t be recognized as a possibility in your own area very quickly if it serves a distinct purpose?
People will argue that the rules, regulations and increased complexity are a choice, and despite the increasing energy and material cost of these growing phenomena, it is a choice humans have made, so humans could also choose to undo it.
What they always fail to recognize is that money, debt, patents, stock markets, bond markets, religions, etc., are also just stories that humans have told ourselves and convinced each other are real, when realistically they are all part of the socio-economic fabric of the world we’ve built and are real as this super-linear scaling is what keeps modernity functioning.
As a civilization, we have super-linear scaled our use of energy, materials, and every socioeconomic metric, as we’ve grown to this scale on a finite planet. We have a 6 continent supply chain based on so many factories, processing plants, mines, banks, letters of credit, ports, ships, trucks, railways, flights, markets, organisations, trade blocks, that work in such a complex fashion, that it’s impossible to understand it all.
If there is anything we can learn from all other types of super-linear scaling it’s simply that they all end, and always very abruptly, compared to the time they were in the super-linear scaling phase.
Again I’ve used A.I for this last bit..
Is there any type of super-linear scaling that has ended gently?
There are no examples of super-linear scaling ending “gently.” In physics and biology, super-linear scaling is inherently unstable because it creates a positive feedback loop that accelerates until it reaches a physical limit.
In every known natural case, the ending is a discontinuous “break” or a catastrophic phase transition. Here are the three ways nature “ends” super-linear scaling:
The large star. It never “tapers off.” It burns faster and hotter until it hits the Iron Wall. The end is the Supernova—a sudden, violent collapse followed by an explosion. The system doesn’t “downsize”; it is physically obliterated, leaving only a tiny, dead remnant (a neutron star or black hole).
The bloom model of Algae or Locusts. These systems grow until they hit the Metabolic Ceiling of their environment. Because they have no “brakes,” they consume their host or their food supply entirely. The Result: A total population crash. 99.9% of the organisms die in a matter of days or weeks once the “Iron Wall” of resources is hit. The “scaling” ends in a wipe, not a transition.
The wildfire. A wildfire or a forest fire exhibits super-linear energy release as it grows (heat creates wind, which feeds the fire more oxygen). The Ending: The fire does not “gently” decide to become a candle. It accelerates until it either runs out of fuel or exhausts its oxygen. The Result: A sudden “flicker and out” or a massive “flashover” collapse. The system leaves behind a high-entropy state (ash) that cannot support any further scaling for a long time.
To conclude an already too long essay on a topic that deserves a book, this video of Prof Geoffrey West on Nate Hagens’ Great Simplification podcast opened my eyes to the world of scaling laws and its importance in our civilization.
On this episode, physicist Geoffrey West joins Nate to discuss his decades of work on metabolic scaling laws found in nature and how they apply to humans and our economies. As we think about the past and future of societies, there are patterns that emerge independently across cultures in terms of resource use and social phenomena as the size of a city grows. Does Kleiber’s law, which describes the increasingly efficient use of energy as an animal gets larger – also apply to human cities? How have humans deviated from this rule through excess social consumption beyond a human body’s individual metabolic needs? What could we learn from these scaling laws to adjust our communities to be more aligned with the biophysical realities of energy and resource consumption? Can an understanding of social metabolism impact our social metabolism?
I recommended you watch the entire video, but the most important part is from 32.30 to around the 42.00. Be cognisant that the scaling laws Dr. West refers to are inside the main residential areas and it seems from lots of research I’ve read to exclude the heavy industrial areas, which explains the actual amount of energy and materials our civilization uses.
Most of the video past the 42 minute mark demonstrates the usual human denial by looking for ways to overcome fundamental laws of physics that clearly show anything that grows exponentially (aka super-linear scaling) comes to a rapid end.
To conclude, civilization is a physical phenomenon, not really different to a large star that has both sub-linear and super linear scaling, nor that different to a locust plague or algal bloom, consuming every available resource until it reaches a limit, and then the entirety of the system just dissipates.
You will not find any physicists arguing that civilization is not an energy dissipative structure, so why should civilization end differently than any other energy dissipative structure?
Even in Prof Geoffrey West’s findings of scaling laws that apply to cities, he and his colleagues still find that “innovation”, being the important element (not total energy use), must keep increasing at a faster rate and still reaches a point of “singularity” anyway. Singularity is a polite physics term for collapse. (He explains this in the video link above anyway).
All past civilizations have collapsed, and some people like to use them as models for our potential slow collapse. However all past civilizations were agriculturally based for their energy in the cities, with the proportionally massive rural population living a mostly subsistence lifestyle, so could easily carry on exactly as they had prior to the town/city or state developing.
Even the Roman Empire at its peak only had around 2% of the population in Rome itself, with around 7% of the total population in all urban areas. Our modern world is vastly different to this, with the developed world often having 70-80% or more of the population in urban areas, and the farming relying upon all of modernity to take place. We have neither the skills nor the equipment/animals to go back to a subsistence type of agriculture, like those in collapsed civilizations of the past.
I attribute just as much human ingenuity to those living in prior civilizations as we have, yet this never stopped them from collapsing, nor did human agency, and we could argue that they had more agency than we do in modern democracies, as it’s easier to change rules and how people live in monarchies with absolute rule, than in modern democracies where governments come and go every few years.
Just referenced this essay in a comment on an Honest Sorcerer post.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thehonestsorcerer/p/the-myth-of-american-energy-independence?r=2jdxtk&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=267484574
Thanks for trying.
I tried very hard to raise awareness of MORT on every site that should be interested in it for many years and completely failed.
I don’t try any more.
I had one small success with Alex Smith @ Radio Echoshock that lasted for about 2 days before Alex completely forgot (or denied) everything he learned and clearly understood while interviewing Dr. Varki.
Smith never mentioned MORT again despite in pretty much every one of hundreds of episodes that followed lamenting the fact and wondering why everyone denies the implications of climate change.
Another small win achieved even less. Nate Hagens interviewed Dr. Varki with assistance from me to set it up but there were technical difficulties that resulted in the audio quality being too poor to release.
The interesting thing is that Hagens never mentioned what he learned from that interview, despite MORT being 100% relevant to Nate’s life’s work.
I continue to marvel at how such an important theory is ignored.
Ditto for CACTUS.
Very very very few people are actually interested in understanding the forces drive overshoot and its implications.
Hell, if you pay attention, I’m one of very few people that consistently uses the word “overshoot” to describe our predicament.
Robert Barnes with another insider zinger on the mental capability breakdown and unprecedented corruption inside the White House.
Things look crazy from our cheap seats looking in because they really are crazy on the inside.
Chris Martenson with a very good big picture summary of the Iran war and it’s implications.
He essentially makes the case for CACTUS unless the US makes meaningful concessions to Iran and he doesn’t think US leaders are capable of this.
https://rumble.com/v7a76uu-the-greatest-energy-shock-in-history-is-coming-and-no-one-is-ready.html
Pretty sure it’s time for that new post Rob, it’s gone a bit quiet around here and any questions about the scale topic have cooled right down..
Yes, the silence on the biggest new idea in a long time is remarkable.
I once had hopes of shifting the needle among the overshoot aware community but two failures in a row tells me they have normal denial genes like the rest of society and I’m wasting my time.
Probably time to shut the site down.
You can’t shut the site down, it’s just about the only place of sanity left!!
It’s taking forever for me to load up this page, browser says the post is using 1.3GB of memory – all those YT embeds I reckon.
I hope you don’t shut the site down, but I can understand if you are ready to call it a day. And you are right, the ideas here have not permeated through to overshoot community one bit. But I rely on you Rob for the big ‘tip off’ ! – joking, not joking.
I love this site Rob, and all the contributors too. Its my #1 go to online community for no bs news and general inspiration from the overshoot aware. Looking forward to many more great posts and comments until CACTUS takes us all offline and full time into the garden 🙏
Say it isn’t so! You wouldn’t leave us, Rob! I know that was just your being melodramatic and we love you all the more for it. How many times do I have to say that this is my oasis and sanity space and how I consider everyone here friends and family.
Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet as of late, in case you’re wondering. After 6 weeks of rain, the dry season has finally arrived and the sunshine beckons one to be active outside, it’s been lovely!
Sending everyone lots of love and best. I will see you and everyone on the next page then.
Hang in there Rob, you are doing Yeoman’s work!! Here’s some ‘Grist for the Mill’ — https://claude.ai/share/285076d0-0cec-40a6-a945-68cf8cf869b6
I would definitely miss this site being active. It really the only one I engage with now as I think the others are too full of denial and fighting.
According to this Reddit post, gas prices could reach $20 dollars per gallon in some parts of rural Alaska.
What’s the big picture?
What happens next?
Does anyone see a different possible path?
Dear Rob,
It would be nice if you could put a date or at least time window on that prediction, so that you can come back later to check.
Many comments of yours invariably end with a nuclear exchange. And, to me, its sounds like the expression of a deeply imprinted fear, rather than the result of a rational analysis.
Best.
At least, we can check in July, if the tanks are empty (which tanks by the way, jet fuel/diesel or any oil?)
April 8, 2031
Hi Rob,
I guess this is tongue in cheek, since quite unnecessarily precise.
So, does this mean you disliked my question?
I just think that quite extreme claims about the future should come with careful analysis and caveats.
But, anyway, thank you, I will go with that. In any case, a lot of things can change in the world until then.
Best.
Maybe this science is related to MORT? :
https://www.aol.com/lifestyle/brain-restricts-full-access-reality-130000256.html
Weogo
I watched the most recent interview with Marandi made a few hours ago. He said they had a deal last night but it’s falling apart today after people who oppose concessions to Iran applied pressure to Trump.
Yes, Trump really did post this.
I read many different links that people show to explain some point or another. When it comes to economics, like the links many on Tim Morgan’s site point at, reading the economics links always reminds me of the 3 aspects economists miss, which is why economics itself only explains the way up the growth curve..
Economics misses, energy, materials, and entropy.
Economics relies upon capital (money) and innovation, without understanding where either come from, but thinking it’s ‘human ingenuity’, so can solve all problems.
The problem with everyone in power following logical economics, is that it does work in a world of plenty of easy to get concentrated energy and materials, while relying upon entropy to keep ongoing sales of everything high.
Of course, because of the larger size of economy (growth in human markets and use of everything), plus ongoing innovation, efficiency gains and technology use, the concentrations of energy and materials can be lower and lower, providing we use more overall in growing the system.
An obvious tipping point comes on a finite planet, but it’s not obvious to economics, which believes in substitution of everything. (Ask an economist what humans can substitute breathing in oxygen with, or drinking any H2O with?(suddenly humans/life are outside the economy, is the usual answer”))!!
Even the economists that do seem to understand that reliance on the rest of the world appears to be a problem and think re-localization and even de-growth is the answer, also seem to ignore all the concentrated energy and materials from nature required to do this and how most of them are ‘over there’, not here..
Again their answer is ‘innovation’ in a smaller market with less of everything. Which means they never truly understood how the efficiency gains came with economies of scale in the first place.
Re-localization with any type of modernity is an oxymoron, it can’t happen. Look around at what any type of modernity requires. Even a great site for hydro power to keep electricity going with an existing plant, wont last long. the really high level grease for the bearings rely upon our 6 continent supply chains to produce when required.
How long do you think the generating plant will last with animal fats instead of high grade synthetic grease of exactly the right type?
Where will the high grade iron ore to make steel bearings come from?
How will you fuel the blast furnace? (what local blast furnace?? How did the local community build it, from what materials and expertise???)
OK enough already, everyone here knows this already. All re-localization ensures is a faster route to collapse. We don’t have the animals, tools, good soils, hardy seeds, subsistence farming experience, nor the small population to go back to a simple subsistence type of living, while assuming the climate remains stable enough to do this (another big assumption!!).
Every off ramp I’ve ever read about, has major flaws in their assumptions and is akin to just plain ‘hopium’.
I also find it interesting all the talk about how we can’t predict the future. Bollocks!! We can!! We know from science that in how ever many trillions of years there is heat death of the universe.
We know for certain that in around 1 billion years and before 2 billion years that Earth will become too hot to sustain life as the oceans boil off.
Well before then though, Mammalian life will not be able to survive, around 250M years at best. (because of sun expansion making the planet too hot for warm bodied species).
There are variables that might change the exact timing of any of the above, but not the overall trajectory and certainty. We never have all the variables plugged into any ‘model’.
Likewise for modern civilization as it exists. We can be certain it’s going to collapse, just the exact timing is too hard to model as we never have all the facts. However the simple variables of lower energy grades, lower material grades with entropy never sleeping, while human civilization civilization tries to overcome these constraints by increasing entropy, using the easiest resources faster, on a finite planet can’t work forever or for long.
All I’m finding are more distractions from reality as people deny a bad outcome for civilization and clutch at straws for answers, as more people start to see glimmers of reality in our near future.
In movie terminology, the force of denial remains strong with most humanity, even with those that can see most of the real predicament.
Unlike Yoda, or Yogi Berra/Niels Bohr I think the future is easy to predict, the timing somewhat more difficult..
We don’t have the animals, tools, good soils, hardy seeds, subsistence farming experience, nor the small population to go back to a simple subsistence type of living
are you applying this to the whole world, or just the majority? Since subsistence farmers do still exist, like slash and burn farmers in the Amazon or rice villages in china, using damn near no fertiliser
Pretty much anyone that has the ability to read this post. Do you really think those that live in any subsistence agriculture that still exists, will be able to remain isolated from the other 8.3B humans that are starving, angry and spreading to eat anything they come across?
Can they build to some type of subsistence agriculture again in the future after the chaotic collapse? That’s a different question, and relies upon the assumption the climate is not knocked out of the Holocene anyway..
I fear that humans will swarm the landscape like a plague of locusts and after the landscape has been denuded, humans will just go extinct.
An interesting question.
Now, perhaps the ‘swarming hordes’ will be averted by the simple fact that by the time people realise that there are no more food trucks coming, they will be so weakened by hunger that hey won’t be able to do much about it?
I enjoy these short stories from Lyle Lewis.
https://lylel.substack.com/p/a-truly-quiet-day-in-nature
Ahh the serenity… (Only Australians will understand this, cue “The Castle”)
LOL. One of Australia’s best movies. I’m in the mood to watch it now. If any of you pirates know where I can find it, please let me know.
The Castle (1997) – IMDb
Good quality, well seeded, 720p and 1080p versions available here:
https://yts.bz/movies/the-castle-1997
Bless you my child. My angels will be protecting you tonight. For the rest of you that knew how to hook me up yet ignored the impassioned plea from your Lord & Savior… all I can say is you might want to sleep with one eye open.
The Ringmaster is coming. Screw that. I’m sending the Boogie Man to getcha… sleep tight. 😂
Everything you could ever want to watch here..
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/movies_and_tv/
I hope you got to see it! Such a classic. This one’s going straight to the pool room 😜
It’s all bullshit. The entire world is in denial.
No one discusses the core issue: US control of Iran’s oil via exchange for USD.
Oil for USD is not mentioned in the requirements for peace by either side, nor by alternative news, nor by mainstream news, nor by pundits.
Perhaps enriched uranium is a proxy for oil for USD? If Iran has nuclear weapons US cannot force Iran to sell oil for USD. But this is bullshit too because you don’t need nuclear weapons to close Hormuz.
How is this possible? Seriously.
Nothing in today’s “peace agreement” suggests more oil will be sold for USD which means the conflict will eventually resume.
https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-05-24
Even Brian Berletic, the most cynical, acidic, realpolitik analyst in the world, doesn’t see things clearly.
Berletic thinks US is trying to force the world to buy more US energy.
I agree Rob. I just finished listening while on a drive into town and back. He has absolutely no inkling of CACTUS issues and how that affects the overall picture he paints.
Berletic is so aware and so confident, bordering on arrogance, that he sees the reality that most others miss, and yet he completely misses the most important element of his story.
Glenn Diesen is an open minded brave truth seeker and he completely misses what is going on too.
How is this possible? Seriously.
It has to be something big and powerful.
I say MORT.
‘Elephant in the Dark’.
I don’t think this is an elephant in the dark because if we turned on the lights and presented the evidence for overshoot and oil depletion and CACTUS they would still deny it.
Then if we explained MORT so they could understand why they deny obvious evidence, they would deny MORT.
I’m willing to bet you a can of sardines that I’m correct if you want to put the effort into trying to enlighten them. I’m so confident that I don’t want to waste my time trying.
Had heard about Andreeson’s techno-optimist manifesto, but never read it.
Well, I finally did ( with a bit of skimming toward the end).
The key phrase that was repeated endlessly was “We believe.”
You can believe all you want, but when your beliefs are disconnected from reality, the consequent blowback will be serious corrective pain.
I got so tired of all the misattributed causation, cherry picking, short term thinking, straw men, and the full display of all the logical fallacies that just had to start skimming.
This sucker is going down with all flags flying, the band at full volume, and folks popping the last of the champagne corks.
So it goes.
gonna go plant tomatoes now.
I assume this is what you are referring to. It’s an amazing example of MORT.
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
This is the full screed I was referring to.
Thanks to technology we have constructed the most complex sex toy to go fuck ourselves with.
Yeah Baby
Thanks, I just got done reading that hilarious satire manifesto. When did Lyle Lewis stop using the pen name Marc Andreessen?
Good lord! I’ve never heard of Marc, but he makes Steven Pinker look like Thomas Ligotti. It’s actually very hard for me to believe this was a serious piece. I mean c’mon, look at this shit:
Andreessen is quite famous in the Silicon Valley crowd, and has legit technical chops. He is one of the key early initiators of the web, and all it has enabled. Also, he’s been a successful angel investor. Unfortunately, his success has ended up making him think that the whole universe works like that. Over time, the wealth has lured hime over to the dark side, going from a long time democratic voter, to shoving money at MAGA superpacs.
Not quite as evil and twisted as Peter Thiel, but you’d probably see them at the same parties.
Reads like a religious text
Norman Pagett adds some color to the great simplification.
https://normanpagett.substack.com/p/you-wont-like-downsizing
Electric cars won’t be useful…
Health will decline…
Solar panels will be useful until they and the devices they power wear out…
Democracy will disappear…
Eliot Jacobson debunks common NTHE by 2030 predictions and then explains what could happen, and what probably will happen.
https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/unfortunately-the-end-of-the-world
I guess all the climate cult people disliked this post because they want everyone to die from climate change, like now!
I almost gave it a thumbs down. I don’t like hearing that humans will still be around in 2030. And I can feel the disdain for Guy McPherson even though the article never mentions his name.
But I have a feeling that my reasons are much different than the three people who disliked it. 😂
I didn’t like it either.
He did not mention the high probability CACTUS risk, but did mention the low probability risks of a super volcano, asteroid strike, solar event, rogue AI, and pandemic.
Got this over at C&E. Made me laugh. Way to go Mother Nature! Now do the same thing to the entire state of California so that I’ll be closer to the ocean.😂
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-23/tasmania-iceberg-breaks-away-with-shipping-containers-on-board/106710726
It’s wrong to blame only Trump. All US political leaders are responsible for this mess.
https://no01.substack.com/p/last-one-out-hit-the-lights
Norman Pagett with a CACTUS theme on the temporarily abnormal existence of cities.
https://normanpagett.substack.com/p/nature-wins
In the not-so-distant future, cities will not be rebuilt after climate disasters. Cities hit by hurricanes will look like the lower 9th ward of New Orleans or the neglected areas of the US “Rust Belt”.
This is a very good discussion between two of the best geopolitical minds on the rock and hard place the US finds itself in the Iran war.
It’s hard to imagine any outcome other than major escalation with even more damage to supply chains.
The depressed old peak oil guy has been quiet for 3 months but he’s back with a brief AI narrated video explaining the wars.
Modernity, it was nice knowing you.
Trump will not be attending his son’s wedding this weekend because he needs to be present in the White House.
Preptip:
I think I’ve got my food necessities mostly squared away so lately I’ve been experimenting with long shelf-life inexpensive dessert luxuries that will likely be scarce post SHTF, and that I might appreciate as a treat once in a while to augment the oats, rice, beans, etc.
I’m also thinking that having the ability to make and share a rare treat could be a great way to make friends.
Sweetened condensed milk seems to be a fantastic prepping ingredient. It’s not expensive, has a super long shelf-life without refrigeration, and makes at least 2 simple delicious calorie dense desserts.
Sweetened condensed milk has an interesting history:
Note that evaporated milk is also shelf stable, but because it does not have added sugar, must be heated to a higher temperature, which gives it an off cooked flavor.
My first dessert recipe is as simple as it gets and is super delicious:
Dulce de leche (caramelized milk)
My 2nd dessert recipe is more expensive due to the chocolate, however it’s super easy, and semi-sweet chocolate chips have a very long shelf-life due to their low water content, high sugar, and shelf-stable fat. I imagine chocolate, like coffee, will be hard to find and very valuable after supply chains break down.
Modern Fudge
tip: Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk is much more expensive than no name or Asian brands which I find are identical products.
tip: My experiments say you can ignore the best-by date on sweetened condensed milk. I’d trust it at least 10 years past best-by. Ditto on semi-sweet chocolate chips. They do over time get a light coating of what looks like white dust but that is perfectly normal and does not indicate spoilage.
‘Off’ food has its uses, though: if you use milk, cream or fruit juice which is slightly off it will solve constipation issues rather quickly… Quite useful knowledge.
Friday night movie recommendations, collapse style! Some of these I’ve already recommended but after watching them again, they deserve another mention:
Take Shelter (2011) – IMDb
Curtis LaForche lives in a small Ohio town with his loving wife and hearing-impaired daughter. Though money is tight, he and his family are very happy. But then, Curtis begins having terrifying dreams about an apocalypse that threatens them all. Rather than confiding in his wife, he begins building a storm shelter in the backyard, and his strange behavior causes tension in their marriage and the surrounding community.
Couple years back I said if I ever made a movie about learning to cope with overshoot awareness, this is the exact vibe I’d be going for. I still feel the same. And with the added bonus of being the only prepper in my household, relating with the main character does not take any effort at all.
Bone Tomahawk (2015) – IMDb
In the Old West, a small-town sheriff and his rag-tag posse set out to rescue some townspeople from a brutal cave-dwelling, cannibalistic Indian tribe.
The western/horror genre is always fun. These troglodytes are terrifying. I’m expecting my neighborhood to be crawling with them about a month after SHTF.
Everest (2015) – IMDb
On May 10, 1996, mountain guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer combine their expedition teams for a final ascent to the summit of Mount Everest. With little warning, a storm strikes the mountain and the climbers must now battle nature to survive.
Obviously the mountain represents civilization. (out of these films, this one will have the widest appeal)
The Wall (2012) – IMDb Original title: Die Wand
A woman finds herself inexplicably cut off from all human contact when an invisible, unyielding wall suddenly surrounds the landscape.
Worth it just for the beautiful scenery of the Austrian Alps. Been trying to get y’all to watch this one since I came to this site. Rob is the only one so far. Don’t let the sci-fi turn you off. It’s not about the wall. It’s about the survival drive and this dog eat dog world. (Renaee, you should give it a try)
The Terror (TV Series 2018– ) – IMDb Season one, ten episodes
A self-contained story about a real-life British navy expedition in the mid 1800’s which was attempting to find a route around the North Pole. The expedition was doomed. This show tells an account of those happenings, slotting itself in nicely with what genuine details are known about the crew, while also introducing a major and clearly fictionalized component.
Probably the best thing out there if you’re looking for a slow burn about survival, dwindling resources, and the descent into madness (which is just code for nature. But living like all the other animals is insanity if you have an ext theory of mind).
bone tomahawk has one of the most gruesome scenes ever in a film.
Bone Tomahawk also sounds astoundingly racist, based on the description above.
Don’t listen to niko and his scare tactics. The whole family will enjoy this lighthearted Disney film.😉
i liked the Wall. Die Wand
LOL, I just noticed that this is streaming on Disney plus. No joke. WTF are they doing with this movie in their library?
That’s a heck of a pivot. “Ok kiddies, we just got done watching Toy Story. Now lets see what this Bone Tomahawk is all about.”😂
We did watch it, but remember with the pirate download copy we were not able to get any audio with it, so it made even less sense! But even the visuals of the wall around her and no explanation was striking and creepy.
I am still watching movies, but seeing how this is a distraction and aiming to be more acquainted with boredom to understand the blob in me, and that even watching movies is ‘striving by proxy’
Oh shit!! Renaee’s not messing around folks. She’s gonna be a zen master soon.
Good luck woman. And just remember to follow MB’s words of wisdom:
One of the most powerful ways of ejecting your conditioning is to be honest with yourself. You are a self-serving, nasty, wholly selfish, deceitful little fucker. Now, doesn’t that feel better?
🤣 🤣 🤣
I promise I won’t become holier than thou ….
One more thing, shared your movie list with Andrew and when we watched Into the Wild the other night, he said that the guy who wrote that book, Into the Wild, also wrote the same book, Everest, and he was in the Everest expedition and survived, got out alive to be able to write about it – the book the film was based on.
He also said The Terror was great, but that it was ‘not for me’. We had a long chat about boredom and movies, and the upshot now (after my smart ass comments) is that I can never use the excuse that this movie is too boring, I have to sit through all the boring movies as martin butler says so 🤣
Love your movie recommendations. Never heard of The Terror and it looks great. Thanks!
FYI – Was looking to see if I had ever mentioned Everest before. Found it in a comment I made re cold weather movies. Very cool post if I do say so myself.
If you’re looking for something to watch, bunch of good titles listed here. But beware. After a few seconds on this link, there is spooky music that just starts playing out of nowhere.
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/20/by-paqnation-aka-chris-humans-are-not-a-species/comment-page-3/#comment-105157
Enter Cold Weather video games:
I saw your comment about most new movies being crap.
I have spent 20+ years of closely monitoring new movie releases and have noticed a big change in the last few years. Today I see maybe 1 good movie for every 50 that are released.
The same applies to documentaries. Almost all new documentaries are dumbed down fluff.
One exception might be TV series. I find there are too many good ones now to watch them all.
What do you see and what do you think explains it?
I don’t know. The age of idiocracy is the easiest way to sum it up. But I’ll try to pin it down a bit.
Movies – formulaic stories.
Probably has a lot to do with the data captured by technology that wasn’t around 20 plus years ago. Studios now have much less risk involved. Just approve scripts where the algorithms assure them of a profit. Writers have to cater to this, so every story seems to be the same watered-down formula.
Documentary – unnecessarily dragging it out.
In 2020 two very successful docs came out. Tiger King and The Last Dance. Both stories could have been told in the normal 90-120 minute format, but instead they were each over 6 hours long and broken up into ten episodes or whatever. Seems like overnight the entire industry went this route. If a documentary has more than one episode I won’t touch it (few exceptions). I was never big into docs so maybe this formula was already thriving prior to 2020.
TV series – dialogue.
Consider yourself lucky if you’re still able to enjoy new shows. This is where I see the idocracy the most. TV dialogue has always been more natural sounding than movie dialogue. And since I despise the way we talk nowadays… makes sense that TV is dead to me.
Thanks! I had no idea they are using a formula to judge scripts. I wonder if another issue is similar to music with all the good riffs having already been discovered?
Post-Apocalyptic recommendations:
(Not quite the typical collapse movie, but the idea is that humanity has fucked up so hard that a small surviving city state deduced that the culprit of overshoot is human emotionality and decided to outright ban having emotions)
(taking prepping to 11: build large underground bunker cities!)
Thanks, Book of Eli looks excellent. Adding to my library.
Already have the others you posted except Zardoz which is probably too wacky for me.
Zardoz is not just wacky, it’s woo-woo-wacky-wackest in a league of its own.
But is it enjoyable?
Well. I am a schizoid. I do not really have that “enjoyable” category. I just input data into my brain – and all human movies, no matter how wacky or realistic, just register to my mind as anthropological data points. Zardoz is like a fever dream in which you have a collapsed society (The Brutals) who are manipulated through religion by a small, still technologically advanced Elite (The Eternals). Logically, it does make some sense if you accept the premise and piece things together as the story progresses, but it’s probably a nightmare for anyone who is emotionally attached to realism. From the perspective of the Brutals, there is this giant floating head that spits guns and screams “The gun is good!” From the Eternals perspective, it’s just a large flying machine built to look like a god that a lifeform prone to metaphysical thinking would listen to and do exactly as it is told. But there’s outright magical / high-sci-fi elements like telekinesis, too, so that might be too over the top for fans of realism.
Thanks, downloaded it, skimmed it, and decided not for me. 😉
In that case, the film director has succeeded in his mission: “Director John Boorman intentionally wanted to make the audience feel uncomfortable and alienated.”
“It is built for intellectual friction. It does not want you to escape; it wants to mock human structures (technocracy, religion, eugenics, and modern civilization).”
Reviews say the entire cast was doing acid while filming.
I would not be surprised if that statement was entirely accurate!
The AI: “John Boorman has explicitly stated in interviews and on the film’s commentary track that he was smoking a lot of marijuana and consuming a significant amount of drugs while writing and directing Zardoz. He has even famously joked that because it was the 1970s and he was so heavily under the influence, he doesn’t fully understand or remember what certain parts of his own movie are supposed to mean”
(Fairly unserious, but this scene has been stuck in my head)
AI about this one: “Glen and Randa brilliantly captures what happens when a generation grows up with zero education, zero context, and zero inherited knowledge: To Glen, a waterlogged Wonder Woman comic book isn’t a piece of old corporate entertainment—it is a sacred, historical text. Throughout history, when human populations are cut off or traumatized by sudden technological shifts, they develop “cargo cults”—worshipping random objects (like airplanes or canned goods) in hopes of bringing back prosperity. Glen and Randa scavenging through the detritus of the 20th century and assigning magical properties to junk is a perfect reflection of this real-world human behavior.”
Get it while you still can.
One seeder on one torrent on this planet remains.
I probably wont watch it but the description made me think about the coke bottle from The Gods Must Be Crazy. I saw that movie probably 30 years ago. I just looked up the scene expecting it to make me laugh. But it was actually a cool scene. Might have to watch it tonight.
The Gift from the Gods? – Hilarious Coke Bottle Scene | The Gods Must Be Crazy
It gets better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
We used to watch movies like this in the 70’s at the drive-in theater, and we cut the admission cost in half by sneaking 2 guys in via the car trunk.
(This one is extremely experimental)
Same crew as Léon: The Professional which was excellent.
That one is very high on my list of interesting assassin movies. Definite recommendation from me.
(Very explicit war movie that depicts the collapse that comes with world war)
Don’t look up, look here.
I cashed out on 3/9. Proof that I know the stock market better than all of you.
Btw, I offer rock-solid investment advice for only $250 per session. 🤪
The Marandi AI bot channel was interesting today because it’s the first detailed information I’ve seen on the big explosion that occurred in an Israel defense factory on May 16.
This is clearly a propaganda channel so I don’t know if it is true, and I don’t know if Marandi approves the content, but there’s enough detail here to make me think at least some of it is true.
Great video if you like hearing about pain being inflicted on a nation that thinks it’s entitled to commit genocide.
Just a couple of ramblings from a madman.
1) I watched this Sam Mitchell video today.
https://samhambonemitchell.substack.com/p/a-future-cannibal-mulls-the-difference
Sam says he would have no issues with eating humans. Maybe he’s trying to be a shock jock, but I have no problem believing him. I feel the same way. With one important disclaimer; has to be in the same manner that I am accustomed to eating other animals. From the grocery store in pretty packaging or prepped and cooked at the restaurant.
I’m instantly a hardcore vegan if I have to be part of the process of killing, bleeding, skinning, scalding, gutting, splitting, cutting, trimming, grinding. But if the supermarket has a package of human thighs nicely wrapped up for me… no problem, it’s just meat.
We talk about how when SHTF people are going to burn everything just to stay warm. And eat every animal in sight. True. But for the ones that can stomach the animal processing from field to dinner table, and actually know what they’re doing, there will be tons of meat to survive on. Globally, the average human weighs 137 lbs. In the United States of Obesity, the avg is 185 lbs. I weigh 220 lbs. I’ll provide a family of four food for a month.
2) I still can’t convey the simplest of concepts to my normie friends and family. We had Domino’s for dinner tonight. While we were waiting for delivery, I joked that every king and pharaoh of the past would be jealous of us right now. They didn’t get it. So I picked King Tut to focus on and painted a picture of the supply chain required for Tut to get his nightly feast. Probably 100 or more human slaves involved in getting that food from the fields to the table. And how all we did for dinner tonight was push some buttons on a computer and someone is bringing us our feast within 30 minutes or less.
Blank stares. I said, “C’mon, surely you can see how we have thousands of energy slaves working for us compared to what Tut had. He would be drooling with envy for this type of convenience. Taste wise, our feast puts his feast to shame. And he was the top dawg in the land, by a mile! So just imagine how poorly the others had it.” Just to shut me up they nodded in agreement, but I know they still don’t understand one word I was saying.
ps. Crazy Eddy is missing in action. April 16th was the last time he posted anything. He said he was done with the doomasphere but I assumed he was bluffing. I’m lost without my soulmate. I dedicate this post to you Eddy. Come back baby!
Fun fact: Cannibalism was a socially acceptable practice even in European contexts given certain circumstances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_at_sea
Addendum: For all your cannibal kicks, here’s a video of Hannibal cooking:
Addendum: Eat the Rich, by Motörhead
Uh oh. Seems my talk of cannibalism has gotten J.Doe aroused.😂 Why do I picture your freezer with a severed head in it?
That wiki link was a good read. This bit was very human:
I can just picture those court hearings.
And this was hilarious:
To be honest, I have never been much of a meat-eater. But with my flat affect as a schizoid, I have no disgust reaction to things most people find more or less off-putting. Cannibalism as documented in naval emergencies? I would just register that as a rational choice when all else fails. If I were in charge of corpse disposal in my ideal state, I would have all dead bodies used as food or compost instead of burying them (which ultimately still just turns them into food, just for worms). In the end, all corpses are eaten (but that is also something MORT conveniently blocks)
I would entirely ditch the straws, though, if I were Captain. I would say the person who is oldest gets eaten first, as they would likely be the first to die of natural causes. Potentially factoring in experience – you do not want to eat the navigator if no one else knows where the hell you even are.
Addendum: One great thing about MORT is that it stops people from realizing that at least some of the atoms their own bodies are made from have at some point been part of a human corpse!
Addendum: AI estimates that close to 100% of all the atoms in your body were at least once part of a human corpse.
An important truth about the news today.
I am playing along with this. I bought shares in USO the oil ETF. Every time the WTI price drops below 100 I buy more. My target price for WTI is at least 150 by end of June. I expect to make good money on these fake news stories.
Please come back to let us know if it worked.
Art Berman today on the biophysical phenomenon of war.
Berman provides a plausible explanation for why both the aggressors and the defenders in a war that is clearly all about control of a vital depleting non-renewable resource, actually believe the war is about something else.
I get why the US denies its oil theft objective, but it is VERY strange that Iran also never mentions oil theft.
I’m thinking that war is another dimension of evolved behaviors associated with the Maximum Power Principle (MPP) and MORT.
The program controlling life’s chemical replicators blocks any behavior, like for example a high intelligence that understands its own overshoot, or a moral species that prefers peace, from overriding the Maximum Power Principle, and therefore high intelligence cannot exist in the universe without reality denial, and morality cannot exist without war.
MORT is good for explaining why US denies its oil theft motivation, but Berman’s idea may be better for explaining why Iran never mentions oil theft. Unless we assume Iran avoids discussing oil theft because that would force it to acknowledge its own survival dependence on a finite depleting resource.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/wars-are-the-storm-systems-of-history/
Hideaway, Berman’s idea that war is a recurring self-organizing process might be a relevant and worthwhile addition to your CACTUS theory.
My summary of No1’s summary.
https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-05-21
Nicole Foss was a favorite of mine 10ish years ago when she wrote about the unsustainability of our system. I saw her speak live once when I was just learning about peak oil.
Here is some of Foss’s work I posted on un-Denial.
Foss withdrew from writing a few years ago but is back.
Today she explains her view of the covid crimes. Foss thinks covid was one piece of a global plan to cull the population.
I still lean to blaming clever monkeys in denial trying to make money for status on a bus with no driver that is steered by CACTUS forces.
But I’m not certain because so many dimensions of covid were so obviously wrong they are hard to explain without assuming deliberate malice.
As marromai said:
https://www.foss.blog/2026/05/21/the-bioweapon-population-cull/
“Paul White Gold Eagle
@PaulGoldEagle
·
May 13
EVERY VACCINE BATCH HAD A DIFFERENT FORMULA. THE LOT NUMBERS JUST PROVED IT. Not a theory. Not an interpretation. A dataset. 12,000 lot numbers. Cross-referenced with VAERS adverse event reports. The correlation is absolute. A team of researchers — 4 statisticians, 2 pharmacologists, 1 former FDA regulator — published their findings on a decentralized server Wednesday. The paper is 147 pages. Peer review was impossible because no journal would touch it. So they released it directly to the public. The finding: specific lot numbers produced 4,000% more adverse events than others. Not random variation. Not manufacturing inconsistency. A deliberate, systematic pattern. ⟁ Lot numbers ending in 20A through 20F: near-zero adverse events. Saline. Placebo. Water with a label. Lot numbers ending in 21K through 21X: moderate adverse events. Fatigue. Myocarditis. Blood clots. Hospitalization rates 300% above baseline. Lot numbers ending in 22R through 22Z: catastrophic. Stroke. Cardiac arrest. Neurological damage. Death rates 8,100% above the statistical norm for any pharmaceutical product in history. Three tiers. Three formulas. Distributed in a pattern that ensured no single hospital, no single city, no single demographic received enough catastrophic doses to trigger an obvious statistical signal. They spread the damage thin enough to call it “rare side effects.” But it wasn’t rare. It was targeted. ⟁ The distribution pattern wasn’t random. The catastrophic lots were sent disproportionately to specific zip codes. Zip codes with high concentrations of military veterans. First responders. Independent business owners. Communities with historically low compliance to federal mandates. The people most likely to resist were given the most dangerous doses. The moderate lots went to urban centers with high media consumption — populations that would report mild symptoms, be told it was “normal,” and return for boosters without question. The placebo lots went to politicians, media figures, and pharmaceutical executives. The people who promoted it on camera. The people who told you it was “safe and effective” while receiving saline. They took the same shot on television. They did not take the same formula. ⟁ The 12,000 lot numbers are now mapped. Every batch. Every destination. Every outcome. The data is on the blockchain. It cannot be retracted. It cannot be memory-holed. It cannot be fact-checked into oblivion. The former FDA regulator on the team submitted the dataset to the military tribunal with a single statement: “This was not negligence. This was a weapons deployment protocol disguised as public health.” The tribunal accepted it into evidence Thursday morning. Case number: GT-2026-0441. Every lot number is a fingerprint. Every adverse event is a witness. Every death certificate is an indictment. CODE: LOT-NUMBERS / 3-TIERS / ZIP-TARGETED / GT-2026-0441 They didn’t give everyone the same shot. They gave everyone the shot they were assigned. Now the assignment list is evidence. ♟ Someone you know got a different formula than they were told. Share this for them. Mr Pool”?
https://x.com/PaulGoldEagle/status/2054406543089799515?s=20
Validating or refuting this analysis is above my pay grade but I can say this:
1) Hot dangerous batches in the early days due to manufacturing inconsistencies is a known fact. I have seen no one claim this was deliberate instead of incompetent.
2) I follow most of the credible covid dissidents and they watch for and report on new evidence. I have seen no one mention this study.
3) Zero important dissidents follow this account.
4) The tone and cadence of this tweet tells me it was written by an AI.
I think I remember this was already brought up in some old comment at un-denial (probably towards the end of the covid episode). I remember there was a graph. I thought it was really clever and the kind of things mad scientists who consider the populace as guinea pigs could imagine. Maybe you can find the previous comment with your special access to search function. That way, you can at least check if it was from the same source or another.
It was probably around this time and citing this earlier article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13998
(There has been later studies that demonstrate this is an illusion due to some dataset biases. But is it, or is it not? That’s the whole funny point)
Anyway, AI is good at looking up such information, but not analysing the trustworthyness/soundness of scientists and studies.
Best.
I have no idea how to search for what you suggest. I and others posted hundreds of covid related links.
My main red flag on the veracity of this claim is the complexity of the supply chain and the large number of people involved. How could you send saline to only the few journalists and politicians in a community, and how could you keep the operation secret? Seems very improbable to me.
What is the motive for this? Most of our leaders don’t seem to be overshoot aware, and if they are CACTUS aware, they would be against something like this.
Herman Daly was a respected overshoot expert who influenced many other overshoot experts.
Daly’s life’s work was based on the idea of sustainable development, achieved by governing civilization with ecological economics.
CACTUS shows that Daly’s work was complete nonsense.
CACTUS is a big deal.
https://steadystate.org/overlooked-steady-staters/
Prof. Alf Hornborg shows that equality is impossible with technology.
If the person making clothes has the same salary as me I would make my own clothes.
It is the same with farming. If the farmer had the same salary as me I would be better of making my own food.
Alf Hornborg also shows that industrial revolution only was possible with depopulation of natives in America and slavery.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137567871
Are you sure about this?
Let’s say you make clothes and I grow food for a living and we have the same salary.
Neither of us has the capital or time to do both so we happily trade with each other.
Inequality is not certain, although it might emerge if one of us is able to leverage debt and energy better than the other.
Yes I am sure. Some of us is better at making clothes or food. In the exchange there will evolve unequal exchange.
I misunderstood your original point. I thought when you said both have equal salary you also meant equal skill. If skill differs there will be inequality. Also luck and leverage from debt and energy.
My big complaint against “ecological economics’ or what the “Limits to Growth” people and every variant of the above, is about the lack of understanding of the geology, mining and processing of all the materials humanity uses.
None of them really understood that ‘resources’ we use are concentrations of ‘resources’ upgraded by all the processes of life, climate, erosion, water, plate tectonics, volcanic activity over billions of years, into forms we have found useful for both making tools and enhancing the feeding of ourselves.
All the processes of concentration were just islands of complexity within an overall system of entropy and dissipation in the natural world. We humans have learned to purify these concentrations into our modern world.
None of it is sustainable as it is always fighting entropy, which is the natural state of the universe.
We used up all the highest grades of everything, and to do our purifying to make the ‘tools’ we need for food production and transfer, water transfer, concentration of lower grade resources, requires an increasing amount of energy, which means more ‘tools’.
There is no possibility of standing still, as that instantly means decline, because the grades of everything are declining, with entropy and dissipation everywhere.
Recycling is what’s proposed as the future to get around entropy, yet realistically we recycle less today than in the past. I’ve just been reading stories of building demolitions to build new ones. In the past, as in many decades ago, the old were dismantled and most useable components were re-used. Today we get giant excavators tearing down the old, with all the rubble placed in skips and transported away to mostly dumps..
Why? Why in a so called ‘greener’ economy does this occur? Simply because of the many layers of money and rules, the scaling up of complexity. There are occupational hazards in dismantling old buildings, so insurance and occupational health and safety rules make the old practices way more costly. Plus time is money for the owner/developer of the new development and quick destruction and removal of the old is faster, even though it takes more fossil fuel energy to do.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-22/1870s-launceston-tasmania-house-demolished/106699962
https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/e48e1e2574eb1eca3a67d09ea297c9c8?impolicy=wcms_crop_resize&cropH=1000&cropW=1500&xPos=0&yPos=0&width=862&height=575
It’s more expedient to destroy the built world today, as there are always more resources to pick up from the natural world, is the real thinking of human civilization.
All the thinking of anything sustainable ignores the actual direction of civilization, plus the increasing energy and materials required to just stand still with modernity of ANY level.
Thank you for this wonderful analysis. I watched or listened to the TGS interview with Geoffrey West at the time, and bought his book, because I doubted his findings, but didn’t have time to do a deep dive like this. I’m tempted to contact Nate or his institute with a link to this essay.
Tom Murphy has recently published a series called “Two Murphies”, about a debate he had with someone who does appear to believe that modernity can be sustained.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2026/04/two-murphys-part-1/
He just published part 4 today.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2026/05/two-murphys-part-4/
Here we can see the difference between someone with working denial genes and some one who has at least partially broken denial genes.
I left a comment on part 3 that said “I’m enjoying this series very much Tom, but c’mon you have to admit, you’re debating a child.”
He did not post it of course. Just like my last couple of attempts. But this time it might have been my new name that scared him off.😂
I also left a comment, I believe on resilience.org, asking for a chance for Tom to rebut Dave’s conclusion. I haven’t checked on whether the comment was posted or whether there were replies.
It’s not a psychological disorder.
It’s an improbable evolved behavior that emerged only once on this planet.
We’ve all been focused on the Iran war due to the dire implications of Hormuz being closed.
Meanwhile, US and Europe have become much more aggressive in their efforts to harm Russia and a major retaliation by Russia against Europe is now probable, and could lead to a very bad place depending on how US/Europe responds.
Western leaders have lost the ability to put themselves in the shoes of their enemies which has created a very dangerous situation.
There are many MORT tones in this essay by Glenn Diesen.
https://glenndiesen.substack.com/p/europes-irrationality-and-inability
Unrelated:
In my ongoing search for more evidence in regards to MORT, I have come across this individual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33231784/
“Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception
Does natural selection favor veridical percepts-those that accurately (if not exhaustively) depict objective reality? Perceptual and cognitive scientists standardly claim that it does. Here we formalize this claim using the tools of evolutionary game theory and Bayesian decision theory. We state and prove the “Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem” which shows that the claim is false: If one starts with the assumption that perception involves inference to states of the objective world, then the FBT Theorem shows that a strategy that simply seeks to maximize expected-fitness payoff, with no attempt to estimate the “true” world state, does consistently better.”
Anyone familiar with his work? Seems to support MORT, if correct.
Addendum:
Google Gemini about Hoffman’s work: “His simulations yielded a shocking result: Organisms tuned to truth always go extinct when competing against organisms tuned to fitness.”
“Hoffman proves via computer simulations that evolution actively weeds out truth-seekers in favor of systems that prioritize fitness-enhancing illusions.”
That sounds about right. Technology requires an uncompromising look at reality and mathematical precision in order to make tool fit substrate just as an enzyme evolves to fit substrate precisely. The goal is to make the resources flow through the dissipative structures in furtherance of a homeostatic state as efficiently as possible. The remainder of reality can be or must be obfuscated or dismissed. This is why we have the Phd. homozymes that are geniuses at making technological advances while being unconscious of the unsavory aspects of reality or covering them with fictions that suit their emotional needs or innate needs to continue their dissipative functions.
The idea that our brain does not accurately model reality seems plausible and likely. It’s easy to think of examples we’ve all experienced to validate this idea.
Hoffman’s explanation of this idea is another matter.
AJ and I briefly discussed Hoffman’s book 4 years ago here:
https://un-denial.com/2021/12/15/by-bill-rees-on-the-virtues-of-self-delusion-or-maybe-not/comment-page-5/#comment-57630
P.S. The book Life Ascending: The Ten Greatest Inventions of Evolution by Dr. Nick Lane is my favorite book of all time. I have read it many times and it will be the last book I read before dying if I have any say in the matter.
Dr. William Rees today with an essay on his experience studying human overshoot and the origin of the ecological footprint idea that he is famous for.
Rees is a top expert on overshoot yet does not understand CACTUS because he thinks it is possible for a steady-state modernity to exist.
Another top overshoot expert, Dr. Dennis Meadows, who authored the 1970’s Limits to Growth study, also made the same error.
Hideaway’s CACTUS theory really is a big deal because it invalidates core beliefs of overshoot experts.
https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/carrying-capacity-the-vinegar-in
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that “carrying capacity” graph, but it always annoys me. It makes out that the carrying capacity is around half of the overshoot level. That’s just plain wrong, and was for things we know that go to super-linear scaling like locust plagues, algal blooms or even the Reindeer on St Mathew’s Island.
Realistically the carrying capacity line is 95%-99% down towards the ‘time’ line.
Where it’s currently placed makes it look like Earth had a carrying capacity of 4B humans, whereas the last time humans were able to survive for tens of thousands of years, even with damage and extinction to many mega fauna species, the human population was around 4M.
Dennis Meadows and the whole “Limits to Growth” team and computer program, missed the ever decreasing grades of resources and that efficiency gains had limits, so there never was a sustainable population with any modernity.
Modern civilization relies upon mining of both energy and materials to overcome entropy and dissipation. It’s a process that has to rise exponentially just to replace what’s lost to entropy and dissipation, no matter how many or few our population is.
Exponential growth of an energy source, no matter what it is, on a finite planet, just does not work in the long term, because of the laws of thermodynamics. Unfortunately it’s that simple.
Once we work out that modernity was never sustainable, because of physics, the rest of CACTUS falls into place. Most people don’t understand simple physics laws of thermodynamics, or don’t want to understand them and there implications for civilization.
That’s a good explanation of CACTUS.
Meanwhile, every overshoot expert in the world is silent on CACTUS.
How is it possible that they all ignore the biggest new idea in their field of study to emerge in a long time?
I think the cause is MORT, another important theory that everyone ignores.
It’s ok to discuss overshoot if you believe a solution exists for modernity to continue at a reduced population.
It’s not ok to discuss overshoot if it’s impossible for modernity to continue under any circumstances.
Tom Murphy seems to believe that Modernity is inherently unsustainable, but he discusses it in a long-term abstract sense, and not in a sense that Modernity will end abruptly during the lifetimes of many of his readers.
All hope is lost for US democracy. Thomas Massie was defeated today.
there was no democracy. It has always been you will vote for who we let you vote for. Democrats did it blatantly with Kamala. It is all corrupt.
Citizens could have voted for Massie but enough were swayed not to by $32+ million from Israel spent on ads against him.
Any citizens that watch ads and are swayed by them deserve to get something that is not a very good outcome.
If you care about the Thomas Massie story and what it implies, you will love this inspired monologue by Tucker Carlson.
I tried but had to bail after this part because my bullshit detector spontaneously combusted.
Let me get this straight. This real estate mogul, reality television star, relentless self-promoter, tabloid whore (and then add everything that’s happened since 2015 when Trump got into politics) … about a year ago, Tucker was convinced that this dude was gonna get America, for the first time in its history, to put the concerns of its citizens first because Trump had already clearly proven to Tucker that he was the man to “service to the people you lead and a love for those people.”
I wouldn’t have believed this horseshit even back in my peak clueless fucking moron days (2012ish. Duped by Obama. Every night dvr’ing Rachell Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Stewart/Colbert). And Tucker’s way smarter than me. I’m with Cynic on this 100%:
It’s true that Tucker is clueless about overshoot and CACTUS, and has a right wing bias, but my sense is that he’s a good man trying to understand what is going on.
It’s also true that Trump is an ignorant corrupt narcissist, but something definitely caused a dramatic shift in his policies on debt reduction, war, and Epstein disclosure.
Was it blackmail by Israel about his involvement with Epstein, or was it the CIA informing Trump about the realities of oil depletion and debt limits?
Maybe it was both with the CIA telling its Israel branch office what to do, as I’ve long suspected.
Israel’s too small and weak to be in charge of the US empire.
Pretty good interview from the perspective of highlighting how confusing and crazy the world has become.
Insider experts have no better understanding of what’s going on that we do.
Among many other issues discussed, Pakistan just sent 8000 troops to Saudi Arabia. Why? To protect Saudi Arabia from whom? Iran or the US?
I doubt that the region or the world economy will recover from this. Even if it doesn’t trigger CACTUS, it will be a permanent step down in catabolic collapse.
Nate Hagens today unveiled his MEGA-PLAN for how we should prepare and respond to CACTUS.
The most important thing I noticed is that Hagens does not mention our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realties, nor how he plans to cause the 95% of citizens who deny overshoot to understand what is going on and embrace his plan instead of becoming violent and making things worse.
This despite 10+ years of me trying to teach Nate about Dr. Varki’s MORT.
It’s a plan, like Jack Alpert’s original plan, that skips Step 1, that all subsequent steps depend on.
How is this possible? Seriously.
P.S. Hagens also does not mention CACTUS, but in his defense, CACTUS is a new idea and I’ve not put any effort in making him aware of Hideaway’s theory because I learned from MORT that it is a waste of time.
https://natehagens.substack.com/p/essay-what-to-do-as-the-world-falls
Nate Hagens first recaps our overshoot predicament without using the word overshoot:
Then Nate provides advice on what we should do about overshoot.
He uses a lot of words that are hard to summarize but here is my attempt:
1) Find like minded friends.
2) Make plans for surviving with less of everything.
3) Protect nearby ecosystems from more damage caused by collapse.
4) Be kind to others.
5) Participate in and shape local government.
6) Tell new stories to shape our culture to cope with reality.
7) Design a new economic system for your local region.
Nate proposes we implement all of the above in 3 phases:
A) Move fast now before everything breaks.
B) Prioritize use of resources so our system bends instead of breaking.
C) The Stable Attractor – no idea what he’s talking about – maybe one of you can try translating this mumbo-jumbo:
Concluding Thoughts
The plan to solve the human predicament, summarized:
Pretty accurate summary. Well done.
Nate sounds plenty worried. I think he feels a deep responsibility to hand his audience some sort of agency.
I think there’s much going on inside Nate’s head that he doesn’t want to say out loud.
Yes I agree, Nate is not at peace with reality.
On second thought, you left out his discussion on scenario thinking. The premise is that we don’t know the future. There may be futures we can rule out, but how things will play out falls along a wide probability spectrum. He uses scenarios to outline different possibilities in different domains, and ways to characterize what we might see as we witness some set of stories playing out. He also tells us that the different narratives are not mutually exclusive. Different storylines will play out on different timelines in different places, or even within the same time and place but among different demographics.
So the question Nate poses to viewers is how can we be our most effective selves in an ocean of uncertainty.
I consider this to be a very reasonable question, regardless of how closely you subscribe to the Sapolski vision of determinism. If you find yourself called to help alleviate some misery somewhere, it really doesn’t matter whether that calling arose from deterministic past occurrences or whether it arose from some version of free will emerging from your soul, whether the individuality assigned to you can be called a soul literally or merely figuratively. What matters is that, based on the present state of your nervous system and the realities you perceive, that when you observe misery (present or future), and notice some way you can alleviate it, then go ahead and alleviate it.
His self-care, interpersonal networking, six fronts of intervention and three phases are intended to provide those of us who are paying attention with agency to alleviate some degree present and future misery within some range of possible futures.
Not sure whether it’s this TGS posting or a later one, but he does clarify that he doesn’t expect any one individual, or even any small local group to implement or attend to every facet of all six fronts. Rather, if you’re watching or listening, and something comes up along one front where you have some capacity to act, it might spark something inside of you to go act on it.
I also don’t hear him placing excessive individual responsibility on anyone’s shoulders. Rather, he blames our woes on the metabolism of the Superorganism, while giving us individuals and groups some clues for finding antibodies to resist the cancerous growth in some portion of the body of humanity (or body of Gaia, incorporating the more-than-human life).
Nate seems well aware that the cliffs of nuclear holocaust and other forms of mass die-off are in our spectrum of possible futures. But there is no preparation to be done for those possibilities, no agency to alleviate the ensuing misery. Better to act in preparation and provisioning for the other possible futures in which some misery could be averted, life could continue, and the web of life could heal.
And that is how I choose to live my life, whether that choosing is determined or not, it doesn’t matter. I can accept that human extinction or even extinction of all life on earth is a possibility within what would normally be my lifetime, and simultaneously live my life focused on the spectrum of possible futures that are not so nihilistic. Aiming to support some version of continuity of life is not mutually exclusive with contemplating the possibility of annihilation.
You and Nate are correct that there are many possible stories for our future, and it is impossible to know which will play out.
On the other hand, CACTUS teaches that some stories are physically impossible, and therefore we know for sure that some stores will not exist in our future.
I think Nate includes some stories that are impossible.
I don’t know what stories you believe are possible so I don’t know if we agree.
Some stories are absolutely impossible.
In Nate’s original 2×2 grid, with Simplification, Green Growth / Techno-utopia, Mordor, and Mad Max, I think Green Growth / Techno-utopia is patently impossible. I suspect that Nate would agree, but needs to include it partly for completeness and partly to keep the attention of viewers who are partial to it. After all, Nate is a competitor in the attention economy.
I think Mordor already is pretty descriptive of our present reality, and it’s leaning more and more in that direction.
Mad Max is certainly plausible. Mad Max in parallel with Mordor for different times, places, and demographics is plausible.
If any humans survive the oncoming collapse, then at some point below a population of a billion, and I don’t pretend to know the threshold, the Simplification picture could emerge. Actually, it’s the only sustainable path for humanity – I think prolonged Mordor and/or Mad Max would lead to homo sapiens extinction, although no clue of the time scale.
The ultimate Simplification, well under a billion homo sapiens, living a mostly foraging lifestyle, perhaps with some herding and horticulture, would resemble the Paleolithic in many ways. It would be a return to the life our species evolved to lead. It would be different of course, as it would take place on a much warmer, impoverished earth, with many uninhabitable zones, and with access to industrial detritus, and remnants of stories from the industrial age.
I like Nate’s framing of doing whatever we can to leave the ideas to support the Simplification lying around, to be picked up by the remnants of humanity. We won’t be here to see it. Maybe not even those born this year would be here to see it. But at least if I do whatever happens to cross my path to leave breadcrumbs for later Simplification, and do whatever I’m empowered to do to stop some harm, however minor, I can die with a clear conscience that I contributed to the best attractor I can imagine.
And if humanity goes extinct, well, none of us will be here to see that either, by definition. But there’s no point in provisioning or preparing for that case, either.
I don’t know where I sit on the spectrum between denial and un-denial. I think I’ve already done some of the pre-death dying work. Once my husband & I sign up with an elder lawyer, I’m having a DNR and a very restrictive Advance Health Directive drawn up. Next year, when I turn 70, my birthday present to myself will be a tatoo. DNR, also spelled out as “do not resuscitate”, across my chest, and the words, probably on my forearm, “I only want to die once.” Maybe on the other forearm, “Let me go.” Beautiful gothic letters, entwined with Celtic knotwork.
Thanks Robin, sounds like we see a similar range of possible futures.
I think the 2×2 grid idea was first used by David Holmgren many years ago and at the time I thought it was a pretty good way of framing possible futures.
Now that I understand more I think it is disingenuous and unhelpful since half the options are impossible and the other half may or may not be possible depending on what you assume they mean.
The popular culture understanding of Mad Max with warlords hoarding gasoline for their looting machines is clearly impossible.
That makes 75% of Nate’s grid impossible for common understandings.
Even Mordor may be impossible with mineral reserve qualities too low for slave labor to mine.
I think it would be much clearer to describe possible futures based on the quantity of energy and minerals that will be available, plus the climate state, since they will determine the population level, lifestyle, and available technologies.
Don’t forget Nate’s three timeframe phases, as well as the potential parallelism.
The endgame has to be either Simplification or Extinction. No point in depicting Extinction, as if that happens, none of this discussion is relevant.
But the current world resembles Mordor more than anything, and Mad Max hoarding & looting resembles the current wealth pump up to the 0.01% gangstas. So we are currently living in a parallel Mordor and Mad Max reality.
It can’t last indefinitely. It has to spiral in to one of the two potential endgames. But despite declining oil production capacity, there’s still plenty of oil to keep drilling, mining, hoarding & looting for years if not decades.
The irony of the techno-utopia fantasy is that it can’t even project a flimsy image of itself without a parallel Mordor mining & drilling world to support it.
In the words of the great Jesse Welles, nobody ever said life was fair, but does it have to be this evil?
PS, last night at a dinner at my shul, I accidentally uttered the “A” word – apocalypse. A woman got up from the table, excused herself, and left. Sigh, my mind is in the gutter.
Yes, sigh. It’s very hard to be aware and to discuss the things unaware people like to discuss. I spend a lot of time alone.
I have been very absorbed of late in the work of Martin Butler, having joined his Patreon and reading a lot on there – he is someone Chris has posted about before. This may be of interest, a document that lays out 12 core tenets of this Negative Philosophy. I would welcome any thoughts from wise un-denialists 🙂 .
1. You Will Die – The fact we are decaying things that die is the reference point for evaluating how we live a life. It should moderate ambitions, diminish self-importance and have a freeing effect since nothing you do is important.
2. To let go is the foundation of all practice. In essence, this means being able to let go of our beliefs, opinions, biases, theories, emotions, and desires in a timely manner. It requires that we are conscious of our inner states and that we know how to let go when we wish.
3. Inner power or virtue is all that matters. Inner power comes from understanding and the ability to act on the understanding. A person with power is not a leaf blown around by whatever happens in life.
4. To “not-care“ is the perfect antidote to life. Unfortunately coming to the state of not caring cannot just be switched on, it is the result of years of letting go. We can always not care because we can not-care that we care about something.
5. Never Try to Change. Negative philosophy is not concerned with morality or rules on how to behave in life. You are fine as you are and all that is required is that you observe yourself and come to understand yourself.
6. No free will. Every effect has a cause, meaning that our behavior at every moment is caused. The notion of free will arises because we are cause blind.
7. No self. What we consider to be a self is nothing more than the thoughts, emotions, and desires that run through our consciousness.
8. Abstractions such as purpose, meaning, truth and morality are human inventions aimed at making us feel significant.
9. Nothing in life can offer satisfaction. This means, of course, that we will always be dissatisfied. But we can not-care that we are dissatisfied.
10. Misery is inevitable. The fundamental dynamics of life, characterized by a permanent state of decay, loss, disappointment, and dissatisfaction, mean that our inner life will be one of lack and result in misery. For those who can rest in their misery, it is something akin to a blessed state.
11. Existence is a case of all-against-all. This is inevitable as billions of creatures compete for power and resources. Polite social activities might disguise the conflict, but it is always there.
12. Happiness is a childish idea. The quickest way to become even more unhappy is to seek happiness.
This is awesome. Thank you. Very succinct and clear, every point.
I don’t really have anything useful to express around it, or nihilism in general, except that much of my life has been a gradual, erratic, journey toward the very conclusions you have listed above.
thanks.
I am glad – and you are welcome. It was a toss up on whether to express / share such a view. Here is one more for the road. He has many, many essays like this!
Not So Serious
After several hours of oblivion, we wake up in the morning and find ourselves in a state of survival consciousness. Our mind, emotions, desires, and sensations are all geared to ensure, as far as possible, that we continue to persist as best we can. This survival consciousness is a bit of a joke, being a product of the brain, and has the sole function of supporting our efforts to get the resources the body needs. Rats have a less sophisticated survival consciousness, but it does pretty much the same thing.
This daytime consciousness we inhabit has evolved to maximize our survival fitness, and not much else. While it is capable of supporting the processing of symbols (words and images mainly), our survival consciousness has not evolved so that we can establish the “truth” of our existence. This consciousness exists in our own perceptual and conceptual bubble; the truth is not within our reach. Our ability to process symbols has proven useful; there is no doubt about that, but we overreach ourselves when we think we can decipher the universe’s secrets.
Taking our daytime waking consciousness seriously is a terrible mistake. It cannot tell us anything other than the price of eggs and the speed of light. In other words, it processes experience. Please don’t look for it to tell you why there is something instead of nothing, whether the universe had a beginning, and why cows have four legs. This survival consciousness is adept at establishing “what” but wholly inept when it comes to “why.”
Unfortunately, this consciousness also comes with the illusion that we are a distinct, definite psychological entity with our own existence. This is a trick of nature to make us strive even harder to persist in our existence. Animals have an instinctive drive to avoid danger and persist, and we also have this. But we also don’t want to lose our existence as a person, despite the fact it is an illusion. It’s a cruel trick because we know that our life will come to an end one day.
If we can understand that during waking hours we occupy a kind of dream set up by the brain, which does not know anything other than establishing the price of eggs or how to calculate Planck’s constant, and that it presents us with a fictitious entity called a self, then we have the possibility of taking daytime consciousness less seriously. It disappears when we sleep anyway, once we have got the eggs and had our car serviced.
As a “creative”….I don’t know how else to express this, there is an exercise from Betty Edwards book, Drawing On Right Side of the Brain, where a drawing is begun by drawing negative spaces or voids around and within the subject, and not the subject itself. A thing may be defined by what it is not. It’s not mysterious. Just a shift in perspective.
What is the proportion of void or empty space to the quantity or mass of molecules that any object consists of? I don’t actually know. But I suspect we float within an infinite nothing, bound by charges and interacting valences determined by density, proximity, mass, and so on.
As a child, I experienced certain fundamental betrayals, that carried some hard earned gifts. Consequently, reality has never been a rock solid proposition. This has demanded a certain flexibility, for which, I am now grateful.
…..and so, what many find disorienting and repugnant in respect to the idea of the essential meaninglessness of existence, belief, cherished narratives, cultural norms, religions, “spirit” or “soul”(lol), “purpose”, Justice, and so on, are just that…comforting, but essentially meaningless.
That said, I love me a cheap red wine, a bowl of pasta with pesto made from basil I grew myself, with a few calamata olives on the side.
….and I believe, for what it’s worth, that every human being inhabiting and invested in global industrial civilization is stark raving mad. Including myself.
now I see MORT everywhere.
Beautifully said. I know where you are pointing to with this void.
I agree that letting go of all those cherished ideas you listed is where the juice of life seems to be, the nothingness, and yet there is the incessant “what’s next” aspect, that means I seldom rest there. I am looking at this in myself.
I was last night transcribing something about the Void, the negative space. Here’s a section:
—–
Because if you can drop all these ideas of purpose, meaning, morality, good, bad and all the rest of it, then it leaves some space. You’re, in effect, acquiescing to the void.
To no meaning, to no purpose, to no morality. To no ideas of good and bad. And that’s a very, very big thing.
And it’s the only way you find peace. But, just to add a little bit of philosophy to that, a character called Kurt Gödel, and mathematicians will know about Gödel, he lived in the last century, and he created something called the Incompleteness Theorem. And what Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem says is that everything you think, all the frameworks for thought that you have, are incomplete.
And what he means by that is that you base your world of thought on ideas that cannot be proved. And that’s true for mathematics, it’s true for science, it’s true for everything. We cannot prove the basic axioms or assumptions for the way that we think about things.
And this is a big disappointment to a whole load of people in the last century, because they thought they were effectively creating a system of thought that was totally self-contained. There’s no such thing. It doesn’t matter what your ideas are, the foundations of them are shaky.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem proves it. He was Einstein’s buddy, in fact he was the only guy that Einstein really wanted to know.
So, our thought is based on shaky foundations. It’s based on the void.
The essence of the mind is the void. It’s screaming at you every day. You might go looking for purpose, and you’ll never be able to convince yourself, because there is no purpose.
The essence of what you are is void. Same with meaning. People have searched for meaning for millennia.
And they might create something that’s fairly persuasive, but ultimately it all fails. And it all fails because the heart of us is void.
Nothing. Nothingness. The void is at the heart of us.
And instead of trying to fill that in when we feel a little bit lost or things seem meaningless or whatever, we should really, really savour those kinds of feelings and thoughts. Because that’s the real us, trying to pop through.
For 16 hours a day, we walk around with this conscious mind. It disappears every night for however many hours, particularly in deep dreamless sleep. Our waking mind is basically the terminus point for the subconscious.
Our subconscious is only concerned really with all the mechanisms of survival. And so the subconscious pushes through to our conscious mind. Get a job. Get food. Get money. Find a mate. Have sex. Get shelter. All the things that we need for survival. Because if you look at your everyday activities, what are they mainly concerned with? Just survival.
So to dance with the void is the most difficult thing that a human being can do. Because we are constantly tempted to fill in the blanks.
Yet if we can sit with the blanks, that is where reality is. Filling them in is just telling ourselves fairy stories. If you can dance with the void, it means being able to bear that tension.
The tension of constantly wanting to fill in the blanks all the time. So, what do you do? Well, you sit back and watch the chimp’s tea party. What’s the chimp’s tea party? Well, the chimp’s tea party is manifest existence.
All the stuff. What Lao Tzu calls the 10,000 things. Sit back and watch it.
It’s a fucking mad house. There are some delightful things. There are some horrific things.
If you get some of the wonderful stuff, great. But you’ll get some of the awful stuff as well. So, sit back and watch it.
And as they say,
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
The void is the real deal.
—–
And so this Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, I think is basically ‘Turtles all the Way Down”. And while it does hold up, it does not mean that I dismiss the laws that have been discovered. I listened this morning to Geoffry West with Nate Hagen, the one Hideway recommended, and it is fascinating that such laws can be observed and tested as the scaling law was – Kleibers Law. But in the end, these are just on the practical level to predict what’s going to happen, and we know what’s goind to happen ultimately, we are going to die. so it’s like, Die before you Die – it could all be condensed down to that.
Re:
Yes of course! And i like this great phrase from Butler – ‘give your beast a wide pasture’ aka let it indulge in what it loves. Don’t suck the joy and pleasure out of the corporeal, but ultimately it fades, it does not satisfy and always needs to be remet again and again, that futility.
Awesome. Thanks.
As an artist, it’s in the void where I got a fresh set of eyes. Where things lose their names and I see them for the first time….again.
I recently felt that I had to reassure a loved one that I am not suicidal over this….the stripping away of various anchors. Because so much simply falls away…..and I simply do not care.
I’m an awareness pulling bindweed from encroaching upon my potatoes with sweat in my eyes….and I laugh, because I know how this ends. But it is not ending yet.
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
https://www.best-poems.net/mary_oliver/wild_geese.html
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
It very kind of you to post the whole poem. Thank you.
Butler’s advice seems like a mentally healthy way of responding to world affairs, and our own mortality, since nothing can be done about the general trajectory of either.
I get some peace from trying to understand what is going on and why, which I think, but am not sure, is his point 3, “inner power comes from understanding and the ability to act on the understanding”. Is Butler curious about the forces that shape our world and our behavior? What is his explanation for why only one species believes in gods, and why only one species has an extended theory of mind?
Also on point 3, what does Butler mean by “all that matters is virtue”? Does he mean that it is important that we try to be kind to others, because that important piece seems to be missing from his prescription. But if he’s advising that we try to be kind, doesn’t that conflict with his point 5, never try to change?
Good pick up re point three, and I was going to question him on that myself. I think the word virtue is used differently here and may be influenced by his fav philosopher, Spinozer, so I will give it some more thought/investigation so hopefully I can clarify, for my own sake as well.
Re your question is he curious about the forces that shape our world and our behaviour. Well yes, but he comes at it differently to you, you have a more scientific approach and it has been most important from a biological / historic way to make sense of this. I don’t think he is interested in looking that far back. However there have been some wacky ideas about ‘is it deliberate’ implying that it is a demonic set up by some malignant force, otherwise how could you account for so much cruelty and suffering in life. I don’t know if he is serious about this or not.
His words with regard to our current predicament:
So in all this, the only salvation is to use our power of reason to be able to observe that, and gain some pleasure in understanding the whole mess. He does laugh quite a lot in his talks, and I sense a light hearted approach, despite it all, which is a good sign to me.
And when I first landed at un-denial, i saw openess to this. I remember one post, where Gaia reflected on the question of whether the whole thing, ‘existence’ has been worth it. And that is a very unusual question that would normally be quite taboo. So I sensed here open minds where looking at such matters is not off the table. But clearly it still offends some.
But most of all, the message is to observe one’s own inner beast, our survival drive, selfish behaviours, desperate will to live, and to understand what is driving that and to have some distance from it. So yes, a healthy psychological approach for these times, given what we know is coming.
Rob, just for completeness. The use of the word virtue here (as i suspected) is different to the present day idea of it and is taken directly from Spinoza. In this framework, virtue is the power to be active. And to be active is to observe or have some distance from the emotions or ‘passions’, so one is not at their mercy, a slave to them. In not being a slave to the passions, it is more likely one will avoid conflict with others, so in a round about way, it’s about virtue in the usual sense as well.
Thanks for explaining Renaee.
A truly excellent summary of his ‘philosophy’.
For me, it reeks of self-pity, is internally self-contradictory and incoherent, and he is what is so aptly called in England a ‘miserable old git’.
Our actions do matter, even on a scale that may look pitiful in a cosmic perspective; and, as I have experienced, even a thought can manifest in reality……
He’s a half-blind cripple assuring everyone that walking and seeing aren’t worth it anyway.
You are very good at dishing out ad hominems but don’t offer anything else.
You can believe what you want, Thermodynamics implies that any of your actions, goals, achievements on any level or scale do not matter as the outcome of it all is predetermined.
There are some contradictions in the work, but being able to hold such contradictions or paradox, is a sign of intellectual maturity.
The 12 tenets are a rich starting off point for discussion about life, death and everything. One I had just now with my 19 year old, after I read out loud the document to him as well.
Your comment ‘even a thought can manifest in reality’, reeks of new age nonsense, much like the work of ‘The Secret‘ from the Australian woman who wrote this best selling book that hoodwinked many thousands of people into believing they determine their own reality with their thoughts, and equally, everything bad that happens to them is their own fault. A cruel and deranged idea. She even went as far as to propose that the Tsunami of 2004 was due to people thinking ‘negative thoughts’!
Florian is right, ad hominem attacks that pay no real attention to what is proposed, are a waste of time.
Thank you for taking the time to summarise this.
I once was mentally convinced by most of that.
But, no, yuk, this is not me, not for me.
Life is incredible. Whatever the circumstances.
I am grateful. And I try to smile and welcome all of it. Which is really not an easy exercise at times, especially for a passionate person like me with strong likes and dislikes.
The most funny thing I have discovered is that, somehow, the people I most despised would sometimes turn into the best company, with time and if I made the effort to know them. It is so not static. Really magical.
The key point here is ‘no yuk’.
I get it, you recoil from this, just as you would recoil from seeing a dead animal on the road covered in maggots and stinking. That recoiling is our survival drive, the will to life and to persist at all costs. That’s all it is pointing to, and the misery such a drive can bring, and to be able to see that if, for example you have gratitude for a beautiful blossoming flower, or a loving relationship, why not have gratitude for a rotting corpse? It’s because the latter diminishes your power and survival. But both are part of life. Decay as much as growth.
Life is incredible what ever the circumstance?? What of the suffering of so many?. The banality of evil, some one who works for 12 hours a day assembling a smart phone for example, never before have humans existed or suffered in such a way. At least in the past, those who were in slavery and had a miserable existence, could not look on a smart phone and see wealth and abundance for everyone else but them. They might have been able to accept their misery a bit easier in the past.
I wonder if you were to put down an alternative 12 tenets, what would they be? Or if you did really attempt to take down each one of these, what would it look like? 🙂 You have been open and respectful in your reply, I appreciate that.
Dear Renaee,
I apologize for antagonizing you.
And these 12 tenets might be true for you. And that’s fine.
Just not for me. And it’s not fear of seeing a dead corpse (I am kind of fascinated by them, actually, because there is so much movement on a dead corpse and then when the feast is over, suddenly it all ceases 🙂
I don’t really have tenets, myself. I encountered a lot of true statements. But then, any written sentence about reality is going to turn out, at some point, a half-truth.
I think Swami Prajnanpad (who I admire a lot, there are many people I admire), said something like there is no truth in general, always in the particular (meaning general mental abstractions are not going to be true, it’s always about the particular lived context of a person). This is, to me, the meaning of “One without a second”. (One is what is, seconds are all the mental abstraction, the mind is prompt to lay on reality)
So maybe you could say my tenets are a big question mark and a big smile to the circumstances I experience.
And so, yes, for me, life is incredible, whatever the circumstances. I didn’t say easy or without pain. Just incredible. A childish awe.
Also, I don’t really identify with my body. The body is like a car to me. I take care of my car (actually I don’t own one, my wife does 🙂 But, what I am is before that. So…
Also, there is a strange power in us which shapes reality. I can make my life miserable, if I choose to. And I can make it incredible if I wish to. Even though, this is not about control. It’s more like my inner state works like a magnet (or maybe only a lens? Who knows really) of outer circumstances.
And about the suffering of so many (I think you mean pain, here? Pain is on the body, suffering is how we live it in our mind, isn’t it?), I really don’t know. I am not them. Why does it resonate with you? What is it that you have to see in you, but externalise? I don’t know, you have to see for yourself. (if the process is similar for you as it unfolds for me. Which just not may be the case)
Also, I have seen enough strange things to tell you that I don’t know where this stops, how huge this thing we call reality really is and the reason of it all. So, I can’t tell you. Again, believes who wants to, and I am not here to tell you this or that.
So yes, I have faith. I choose faith. I smile. And it’s great.
Best.
PS: yes, sometimes I get angry and vent. But then, soon after I usually laugh at myself… What is there to get angry at?
PPS: there is one exercise I do continuously, it has become a habit. It is that of observing my “inner” sensations in response to any “outside” event. When I do that, I can notice a tension I wasn’t aware of, reactions I didn’t acknowledged. And it dissolves, slowly. I know I haven’t finished that work. There is a symmetrical effect: when I correctly (with the right state of mind, at the right pace, with the right intent) work on the outside, it acts as a cleansing ritual inside me.
I hope I could share a bit of all that. I know that the more I try to put in words, the bigger the risk of misinterpretation. Words are so treacherous…
Dear Charles, no need for aplogies, you did not antagonize me, I am genuinely curious and often just passionate in the way I communicate.
Yes – the truth/Tao that can be spoken is not the Truth/Tao – I get that old spiritual trope and agree with it.
Re pain, physical or psychological. I have been interested in it throughout my life and sensitive to my own pain most of all, and that of all creatures around me, and so life long quest to understand where the pain originates from. Eg studied psychology a lot and then when this still draws a blank, looked at the deeper existential pain of existence itself, as well as dabbling in many of the spiritual / new age ideas out there as well.
I think of all the conditioning that goes into that phrase ‘smile’ and be happy. 50 or 60 years ago, when family photos were taken, no one smiled, they all looked grim. Look at us now with our ‘family snaps’ there is so much hiding underneath the frivolity of life, and I find that way more interesting.
Each to their own my friend 😊
PS- Your PPS, i do this too, something similar, though not all the time.
Words are treacherous, but on the screen they are all we have got. I find much more is communicated to me that penetrates when I listen in the context of a conversation.
Good stuff Renaee.
LOL!! I don’t think Martin received the memo:
Great MB session today Renaee! Takes brass balls to push the life negating stuff.
LOL. Wish I lived in Melbourne. I’d take you out for a late-night breakfast and embarrass you by recreating this scene down to the last detail.😊
Dang – I cant see the video?? Says not available in my country. I wished you lived in Melbourne too – we would have long and eventually tedious discussions til the wee hours of the morning 😉
Shoot. Try this one.
Got it – yeah you really would embarrass me!! 🤣 I don’t think I have ever watched this movie. Last night we watched most of Into the Wild, willf finish tonight. It’s different each time I watch it. I forgot how grim it is with his family.
If point 6 is correct (everything is predetermined), which I believe it is, then I am not capable (able) of ‘deciding’ for ‘myself’ on points 2–5, precisely because it is predetermined anyway.
The way I see this is that our actions or thoughts are determined, meaning they are a result of the conditions of the past, of previous influences.
This is not the same as everything being ‘Pre Determined’ which implies that phenomena are pre planned or fated. So saying we have no free will, is not the same as saying everything is predetermined. Viewing things as predetermined is like saying it has already happened or been figured out by something or somone, as a fait accompli.
It’s a very common misconception and Sapolski goes into it in depth in his book ‘Determined’. I just did a quick reference check on AI – it basically says the same:
To explain this difference, Sapolsky frequently relies on chaos theory:
Very intersting, thanks!
But the question remains: Can we decide? Can we be guilty?
my anwer is No. If you are intrigued by this stuff (as I was), Sapolsky’s book is the best place to start. He covers a bit of philosophy to begin with, then gets into the science in later part. It’s a hard slog, but worth it.
Good morning dear Renaee,
Thank you so much for bringing this to light, I am with Christ (or should I say Christ is with me, that sounds like it has more religious vibes) in that we could probably talk way into the wee hours! But the sun is finally shining here after 5 weeks of rain and I am reveling in all the garden tasks everywhere all at once! So very sorry that I can’t comment in more depth but this question of determinism is sticky and as much as I can understand the intellectual side of the argument, my heart says another truth, one that for me fundamentally defines my sense of beingness.
While the stage may be set for each of us, and the lines we are speak and the actions drawn out, but at the final reckoning, the moment of the scene, we can still choose how we are to act, and all the while we can be thinking from our own volition. In my experience of life that has played out countless times, and I have bucked the system in many ways that belied underpinings that by logic should have directed me in another direction. We here at un-denial are also evidence that there must be another factor in play, for why have we chosen to believe as we do when the vast majority of our cohort and even family (who presumably have similar nurture and nature) do not? Of course our lives are mostly shaped, the greatest factors being era of birth, place of birth, and to whom we are born, but for me the crux of what it means to be human can be discovered and experienced in spite and despite all these parameters.
On the other hand, I do very much want to absorb from this determinism philosophy that we are all captive to “fate” and our and others’ actions should not be judged without first understanding, and even better, traversing the terrain that led one to their destination, encompassing all the sorrow and joy around every turn. The main benefit that I seek from this is a more compassionate way of being human, and there is no more powerful way that I know to lead me closer to forgiveness.
I often try to think that although we experience ourselves as individual consciousness, we are really all parts of a universal consciousness. We are like cells or organs of a body that seem different from one another but in reality are part of the same whole, although with our limited perspective we may not grasp that reality. It is our individualisation that gives us as physical organisms the greatest scope of understanding who we are and how we wish to express this, but in the ultimate reality (if there is one) we are all part of a Oneness, however you choose to define this. Everything is contained in the whole, that is a very logical statement that I think even Rob can accept!
Back to el mar’s burning questions, in my mind, on the individual level we must be able to decide, and because of that we must bear the consequences from our thoughts and actions ( and that could include experiencing a feeling called guilt). For example, I cannot reconcile that we have no choice but to accept the outcome of bombing Gaza to the stone age, and there should be no guilt on anyone’s part because these decisions were determined by forces beyond our control.
Otherwise, the construct of being human for me has missed its mark and in my thinking, potential, which is a simultaneous physical, emotional, and spiritual experience. We are here in a body, with a human mind, living within certain experiential boundaries. This is our role, and whilst we can glimpse a understanding of an ultimate reality, one that is all knowing and accepting, and encompassing, that is not the part we are given to play at this moment.
It is well and good to delve into the mind of God (or universe) from time to time, and be able to sense the complete let go, let all, but we as humans are but one form of the physical manifestation of God (or universe). We are most suited to act our part through our daily actions and the stories we tell and play in our lives on this world stage we find ourselves. And perhaps paradoxically, it is only through being the “hands” of God that we can truly understand the experience of God, just as actors who really get into the part become that role.
Oh dear. I’ve gone on in the usual Gaia fashion and I just really meant to say that I am really enjoying this dialogue and how it opens more awareness and acceptance. Sending everyone love and best as we each play our part with all gusto we can muster. These are amazing times and the fact that we are actually living through this drama is an incredible privilege in a very real way.
Namaste, friends and fellow actors.
I am glad you have enjoyed the dialogue and that the rain has eased and you can work in your beautiful garden again. Yes, we three would gasbag for hours, I just know it.
The whole free will thing is always incredibly fraught. I used to communicate with another collapse blogger about this, and he said nothing else on his blog got people as het up as two topics – veganism and free will!
So it’s such a huge topic, and I dont want to take up too much more space than I already have, but to say…
I believe there is a paradox here. The phrase “the man who understands he is a machine is no longer a machine”. In that there is something in humans that allows us to see we are conditioned in our behaviour and therefor know something beyond that – which is this void or emptiness or ‘pregnant nothingness’ from which we came and will return. Lights out. In knowing the strings are being pulled and we are not in charge, means that we have glimpsed we are a slave, but this glimpsing means we are free! And in a practical sense not determined and triggered by the conditioning that made us the puppet that we are. We can play our role on that stage with more grace.
That’s about the only way I could sum it up for now.
What i admire in others and wish to pursue in myself in the time remaining, is dedication to a single task to realise this and to be free from my conditioned nature. And yet I know that there is nothing to do, or be done or to change in any way. All is well. And a bit like collapse unfolding, in that we have accepted there is ultimately nothing to be done.
I look at Nate’s complicated chart, and thank god that I am not concerning myself with trying to change anything “out there” any more – one endless distraction. Although I can see for him it is the culmination of life’s work and he could not do otherwise than that. For myself I kinda wish I never got involved with it all to start with. I now have the selfishness to only care for my inner life and to be able to respond in a way that is not robotic and conditioned and inflamed, but will be rational and at peace and always with a sense of humour to the end – i hope ☺️
I watched an interview of Gary Burton by Rick Beato, then I watched this Tiny Desk Concert, now I’m adding Gary Burton to my library, with thanks to the Russians for creating the best serious and obscure music site on the planet.
Very pleasantly vacuous.
Craig Tindale serves up some more CACTUS shavings that remove the prickly spikes, then adds a dash of sophisticated sounding mumbo-jumbo to give it the fragrance of academic deep thinking, then creates tension by threatening to expose a scary overshoot reality, but fortunately pulls back, and concludes with a delicious secret sauce recipe that renews a prosperous modernity in only 3 to 7 years.
In one short essay, Tindale demolishes Hideaway’s life’s work, and everyone can now forget about CACTUS.
https://ctindale.substack.com/p/money-broke-physics-the-framework
😂 😂 😂
Just finished reading through that word salad of Tindale’s.
As soon as he gets to this bit … “These steps require three to seven years to execute.”
It is just plain wrong. It doesn’t take 3-7 years to implement, it takes energy, materials and complexity to do. Lose part of the existing energy, material and complexity of the existing structure, and throughput of civilization and “building” anything becomes exponentially more difficult to impossible, as it takes energy and materials away from those trying to exist in a state of “less”.
The underlying assumption of every ‘solution’ I’ve ever read is the same, we’ll build more of “%^&*($%@@#”, somehow with less energy to do the building, using lower grade materials that turn up out of the ether, and existing complexity that continues.
This is even when the author themselves has proclaimed we will have less energy, less materials and less complexity. Onward to Nate Hagen’s new essay or whatever, where I’ll bet I have exactly the same complaint about his solution…
Yes but I bet he makes more money from his essays than you (and I) do.