Category: Essay

The Cactus Lens: A Clearer View

Until recently there have been 3 main lenses through which to view our overshoot predicament: debt, energy, and ecology.

Each lens exposes a different aspect of the picture, but not the complete picture.

Each lens focusses on different threats, with different time frames, and different consequences, and each lens suggests a different optimal response.

Overshoot awareness varies by lens and group within society. Awareness of leaders is generally higher than citizens, and in some cases this is deliberate and warranted because broad citizen awareness of the debt and energy threats would increase the probability of short term collapse.

For leaders and citizens that see through any of the lenses, their understanding tends to be incomplete, which has resulted in plans of action that will not help, or that make the situation worse.

This incomplete understanding is caused in part because the issues are very complex, and in part because some aspects of human overshoot have no acceptable or feasible solution, and in part because of the human tendency to deny unpleasant realities, as explained by Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory.

Hideaway, a frequent contributor at un-Denial, Peak Oil Barrel, Our Finite World and other sites, recently introduced a new lens we have named cactus, which focusses on all non-renewable resources and the complexity required to extract them.

I think the cactus lens provides the clearest view of what is going on, what we should expect in the short to medium term, and what we should do.

The cactus lens changes what is in the best interests of citizens to understand.

The debt and energy lenses suggest citizens should remain in the dark.

The ecology lens suggests it does not matter what citizens understand because the ecology threats are longer term than debt, energy, and cactus, and because awareness of ecology issues have not and will not improve anything of substance due to the nature of modernity.

With the introduction of the cactus lens, it is now in the best short term interests of all groups: countries, leaders, and citizens, for awareness to be as widespread as possible.

Achieving broad cactus awareness will be difficult because it is very unpleasant, and therefore will be blocked by our genetic denial behavior, however I propose one idea to start the discussion on how we might spread cactus awareness.

Awareness Lens: Debt

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant credit;
  • Because most of our mines, machines, technology, and structures require significant up front capital to build;
  • Which requires a fractional reserve debt backed monetary system;
  • Which is now used by every country in the world;
  • Which by design requires economic growth to not collapse;
  • Because money is loaned into existence and growth is needed to pay interest;
  • Which means our economic system requires infinite growth on a finite planet;
  • Which of course is impossible and means we should expect growth to slow and prosperity to decline, as they are;
  • Culminating in a dramatic and harmful economic reset;
  • However modernity will survive and will rebuild until the next bubble pops.

Status :

  • Quite a few citizens see through the debt lens, maybe a significant minority.
  • Most aware citizens assume the reset is a ways off in the future.
  • Some people prepare to weather a storm with cash, gold, bitcoin, or sardines.
  • Others trust or hope that central banks will print enough money to kick the can past their expiry.
  • Leaders understand and acknowledge the debt problem but are careful to not cause panic because herd emotions could trigger a reset.
  • Leaders are also careful to not explain the driver of the debt problem, energy depletion, as will be discussed in the next section on the energy lens.
  • The debt threat is closer and more severe than our leaders let on as demonstrated by:
  1. Social unrest everywhere is rising because living standards are falling and the wealth gap is widening.
  2. Geopolitical tensions are rising.
  3. Democracies are oscillating between wider extremes.
  4. Most countries have historically high levels of growing debt.
  5. Growth has slowed, and the only growth possible now comes at the expense of adding more debt than the growth it buys, which is unsustainable.
  6. No political party in power anywhere reduces their deficit or balances their budget because it’s now impossible without crashing their system. The US DOGE effort lasted 5 months before leaders gave up and juiced the deficit to new record highs.
  7. Central banks work hard behind the curtain to keep our everything bubble inflated, and to prevent any significant correction of stock or asset prices. When I was young it was normal for the economy and stock market to experience cycles. We don’t permit cycles anymore. Today there is so much debt and so little growth that a significant correction will result in a reset (aka crash).
  8. Printing bazookas are used to blast any threat before it builds momentum, like the banking system repo problem that covid provided cover for unprecedented money printing.
  9. Our leaders tried but failed to use covid as an excuse to implement the tools needed to manage an economic reset like digital ids/currencies for rationing scarce necessities, and for enabling negative interest rates, and tried via “The Great Reset” propaganda campaign to get us ready to accept nationalization of assets (aka “you will own nothing and be happy”). They will try again.

Implications:

  • The debt lens implies a zero-sum game: In a no growth world, one country’s gain is another country’s loss.
  • Our leaders believe that a country that succeeds in harming its competitors will experience less damage from an economic reset. The goal is to ensure opponents reset before you do, on the assumption that this will prevent or delay your own reset by gaining control of more growth generating assets and markets.
  • Hence we see the weaponization of tariffs and trade, regime change operations, and proxy wars intended to weaken or capture opponents.

Conclusions:

  • A debt reset is mathematically inevitable and will reduce the standard of living for the majority via deflation and/or inflation.
  • Debt resets are hard to predict and control because herd emotions drive the process.
  • Leaders have good reasons to not want citizens to be aware of the seriousness of the debt problem.
  • Leaders are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game.
  • In the cactus lens section we’ll see that the zero-sum game assumption is wrong, which means the current strategy will make things worse for all countries.

Awareness Lens: Energy

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant net energy;
  • Which is the energy that remains after using energy to extract and refine energy;
  • Because all of our food, water, minerals, technology, products, and services are produced and delivered by machines powered by energy.
  • Diesel is the keystone energy that powers our vital mining machines, tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships.
  • Renewable energy is not a solution to non-renewable depletion because renewables require abundant non-renewable energy t0 build, install, maintain, and augment for 24/7 supply.
  • Discovery of new fossil energy reserves is much slower than depletion of existing reserves, and the gap is growing.
  • The quality of non-renewable energy reserves decline as they deplete;
  • Which means net energy is falling;
  • Which explains why growth is slowing, and prosperity is declining, and debt is growing faster than GDP everywhere.
  • We should expect the trend to continue and accelerate.
  • Leaders believe modernity will continue for those countries that have access to energy.

Status:

  • Few citizens see through the energy lens.
  • There are many false energy beliefs in wide circulation including net zero, peak oil demand, abiotic oil, green energy, renewables outpacing fossils, hydrogen economy, nuclear renaissance, space mining, circular economy, etc., etc..
  • These beliefs are nonsense not grounded in sound science or economics, but the issues are complex, and it is difficult for a citizen to determine the truth, especially with deliberate misdirection from leaders, and with MORT driven hope and denial driving behavior.
  • Denial is a strong force that fogs the energy lens because, short of a near zero probability miracle, there is no solution, and the outlook is steadily worsening living standards.
  • Most leaders, with help from their energy aware militaries, understand what is going on, and know the energy threat is imminent. Evidence for this includes:
  1. Inflation of energy intensive products, like food, is high; energy intensive infrastructure is not being properly maintained; energy intensive manufacturing, like weapons, is struggling to keep up with demand despite plentiful printed money available; war is shifting to lower energy methods like drones; and as also seen through the debt lens, debt is accelerating, living standards are falling, the wealth gap is widening, geopolitical tensions are rising, and democracies are at risk.
  2. The EIA this year announced that fracked oil is peaking. Fracked oil is the unexpected savior that bought us an extra decade after conventional oil peaked.
  3. Leaders do not want their citizens to panic, or to spook the stock market bubble which depends on growth, so they do not discuss the energy problem, and work hard to distract citizens with nonsense like optimism for a renewable transition, or by stoking emotions over socially divisive issues.
  4. Trump reversed his no more regime change promises after being sworn in and briefed about US debt and oil forecasts.
  5. Every country with significant exportable oil reserves that is not controlled by the US empire is either under attack or being regime changed including Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Nigeria. Even friends with oil, or close to oil, like Canada and Greenland, have been threatened with annexation.
  6. Propaganda is successfully being used to convince citizens that regime change operations are to prevent terrorism or drug trafficking, not to control oil.
  7. China is stockpiling strategic oil reserves.
  8. A few countries, like Germany, made an honest attempt to run their economies with renewable energy, but it’s now obvious to leaders everywhere that the renewable dream has failed. German leaders now want war with energy rich Russia.
  9. The UK, having drained its own oil reserves, now wants war with energy rich Russia.
  10. Hail Mary investments praying for a miracle are being made in AI and nuclear energy.

Implications:

  • The energy lens implies a zero-sum game: In an energy scarce world, one country’s gain is another country’s loss.
  • Our leaders understand their country’s prosperity requires non-renewable energy, and that it must be secured by any means necessary, including taking it by force from others.
  • Countries are preparing for war by increasing military expenditures, even at the expense of social services demanded by citizens.
  • Nuclear arms treaties are being abandoned, and the arms race is restarting.
  • Lessons learned during the cold war about the dangers of nuclear war are being ignored, and red lines are increasingly flirted with.
  • It’s hard to imagine how nuclear war can be avoided given that everyone’s survival depends on oil, and the zero-sum game assumption of our leaders.

Conclusions:

  • Modernity requires growth, and there is not enough oil left for everyone to grow.
  • Leaders have good reasons to not want citizens to be aware of the seriousness of the energy problem.
  • Leaders are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game.
  • In the cactus lens section we’ll see that the zero-sum game assumption is wrong, which means the current strategy will make things worse for all countries.

Awareness Lens: Ecology

Theory:

  • The resources consumed, and the wastes generated, and the habitats occupied, by the large and growing population of humans, is displacing other species, and causing damage to ecosystems faster than can be repaired by the planet’s recycling systems.

Status:

  • The 8,230,000,000 humans, plus their 35,000,000,000 livestock, plus their billions of pets and other freeloaders like rats, now weighs 80 times more than all wild land mammals combined.
  • Humans use 30-40% of the net primary productivity of all sunlight hitting the planet, plus 16,000,000,000 liters per day of ancient sunlight stored as oil, plus 11,000,000,000 cubic meters per day of ancient sunlight stored as natural gas, plus 24,000,000,000 kilograms per day of ancient sunlight store as coal.
  • The sixth mass extinction is underway.
  • Six of nine planetary boundaries critical for survival have already been crossed including climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, fresh water, nitrogen cycle, and pollution.
  • We have already passed the 1.5C safe limit and are on a path to a 3+C temperature increase that is incompatible with civilization and agriculture by the end of this century.
  • Biodiverse forests are being replaced with mono-crop agriculture.
  • Fisheries are in decline.
  • Sea level rise will damage many cities over the next century.
  • Glacier loss threatens the survival of several countries.
  • Chemical toxins and microplastics are harming the health of all life including humans.
  • Awareness of leaders and citizens about the ecological problems varies widely.
  • Most people are aware of some of the problems, but also tend to superficially simplify them down to one issue, CO2, that can be fixed with solar panels and electric vehicles.
  • Few are aware of the breadth and depth of the problems.
  • Many people deny the severity of the problems and/or that humans have caused the problems.
  • Almost everyone denies the implications of the ecological problems, and the fact there is almost nothing that can be done to address them while maintaining modernity and our population.
  • Every effort, by every country, and every organization, and every citizen, to address the above problems, has failed, and will continue to fail, at least until something forces an involuntary change to population and lifestyles.

Implications:

  • The view through the ecology lens is dire.
  • The long term implications are worse than those seen through the debt and energy lenses because we are damaging the ability for any human lifestyle to thrive, and are also harming many other species.

Conclusions:

  • Life threatening ecological problems, for the majority of people, are further in the future than the imminent problems seen through the debt, energy, and soon to be explained, cactus lenses.
  • All of the ecological problems are caused by the human species footprint which is the product of lifestyle and population.
  • None of the ecological problems can be addressed without reducing per capita consumption or population, and the debt and cactus lenses show that modernity requires growth, which means the ecological problems are a classic predicament, a problem without an acceptable solution.
  • The energy and cactus lenses show that growth will not continue, and the human footprint will soon shrink, which means there may be an improvement to future ecology trends.
  • Many of the ecological problems we have created will repair quickly when the scale of the human enterprise shrinks.
  • Some ecological problems will take a very long time to repair, and adaptation of surviving species will be required.
  • As will be discussed in more detail in the next section, if we somehow became aware that the scale of humanity was going to decrease in the not too distant future, no matter what we do, then we might be able to motivate ourselves to address several ecological issues that would improve the quality of life for the survivors, such as burying nuclear waste, and protecting biodiverse forests and marine ecosystems.

Awareness Lens: Cactus

CACTUS = Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System

The phrase “we’re cactus” is Australian slang meaning something is ruined, broken, or finished, often used to describe a situation where progress has stopped, such as a vehicle that won’t start.

The expression likely originated from the infamous prickly pear cactus, which once infested large parts of Australia before being controlled by the introduced Cactoblastis cactorum moth.

This slang is part of a broader set of Australian expressions for something being in disrepair or useless, including terms like “boonted,” “clapped-out,” “had the chad,” “had the bomb,” and “kaput”.

While “cactus” as a metaphor for being broken or ruined is well-established in Australian English, it is not commonly used in other English-speaking regions.

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant minerals and energy.
  • The majority of minerals and energy we use are non-renewable and finite.
  • Recycling is economically and/or technically impossible for most minerals.
  • For those minerals that can be recycled, there are losses in the recycling process that still result in long term depletion.
  • The quality of mineral and energy reserves decline as they deplete, because we always harvest the best quality reserves first.
  • Mineral and energy extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve quality to maintain flows of resources. For example, compare modern directional drilling now required for fracking with early oil rigs. Or the giant trucks and other machines now required to haul and process low grade copper ore.
  • Rising complexity increases the materials, processes, skills, locations, and number of people needed to design and manufacture the technologies.
  • Rising complexity requires a growing market to support the increasing cost of designing and manufacturing technologies. For example, a smaller population would not buy enough phones to make a TSMC factory in Taiwan viable, and therefore the advanced chips needed for oil exploration and extraction would not exist.
  • A growing market requires a growing economy and population.
  • A growing economy and population increases the consumption of all minerals and energy.
  • Wastes generated by the growing economy and population create increasing frictions to further growth.
  • This self-reinforcing complexity growth system drives an increase in mineral and energy flows until technology, markets, and population can no longer keep up with growing waste frictions and declining reserve qualities, and a critical mineral or energy becomes unavailable in the quantities required.
  • Scarcity of the critical mineral or energy triggers a system wide technology breakdown cascade because many technologies depend on it, and many other technologies depend on those technologies, via an ultra-complex network of dependencies.
  • The unavailability of many technologies then causes many more mineral and energy flows to become unavailable in the quantities required because the quality of remaining reserves makes extraction difficult or impossible without the latest technologies.
  • This self-reinforcing collapse of complexity, technology, and resource flows is certain at some point in the not too distant future and will result in a supernova end to modernity and civilization.
  • Nothing can be done to prevent this outcome, just as nothing can be done to prevent the collapse of a star.
  • It’s not possible to have modernity without infinite growth on a finite planet which means modernity will be short lived everywhere in the universe.

Hideaway responds:

  • Hence the logical solution to the Fermi Paradox. Species that reach modernity anywhere do not last long enough to detect others, that have also reached modernity, spread through time.
  • Given the age of our galaxy of around 13.6B years, and if it took 3.6B years for the first species to reach modernity, then if each lasted from 100 years to say 400 years at best, there could have been 1 every million years giving a total of 10,000 for our galaxy and none would ever detect another.
  • Even if 10 or 20 had popped up at the one time, just through chance, and were more than 400-500 light years apart, they would never know of the other’s existence.
  • Just by shear chance, some might detect others, but the odds of any one civilization detecting another is extremely small.
  • Say we did detect another civilization somewhere in the close area within say 1000 light years. So what? By the time we tried to communicate back to them, the odds of their collapse is high.

Status:

  • A tiny minority of people see through the cactus lens.
  • The cactus view of modernity has not been widely discussed.
  • The closest work that I can recall reading is that by David Korowizc where he discusses the extreme complexity and fragility of modern supply chains, and the risk of their breakdown with energy shortages. Korowizc advocates building more resiliency into our system, but I don’t think he stated clearly that modernity will soon end no matter what we do, as Hideaway’s cactus lens does.
  • The ground breaking Limits to Growth work of Dennis Meadows et. al. assumed collapse could be avoided by adopting a steady state population and economy. Cactus shows this assumption is incorrect. Any dependence on any resource that is not naturally recycled by ecological systems will eventually result in a collapse back to a state that is not dependent on the resource.
  • Other important overshoot aware people like Jay Hanson and Jack Alpert discuss the certainty of modernity’s demise, but do not focus on the non-renewable resource extraction complexity growth system to conclude that modernity will end in a supernova.

Implications:

The cactus lens provides several profound insights that create a clearer view than the debt, energy, or ecology lenses.

List every non-renewable resource that civilization depends on.

ChatGPT:

Fossil Fuels: Oil, gas, coal, oil sands, shale oil/gas, peat.

Nuclear Fuels: Uranium-235/238, thorium, plutonium (derived).

Metals: Iron, aluminum, copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, zinc, lead, tin, silver, gold, platinum group metals, titanium, molybdenum, tungsten, vanadium, niobium, tantalum, chromium, manganese, rare-earth elements (all 17 REEs), and many others.

Industrial Minerals: Phosphate rock, potash, sulfur, borates, fluorspar, gypsum, halite, graphite, silica sand, feldspar, kaolin, etc.

Construction Materials: Limestone, aggregates (sand & gravel), clay, granite, marble, slate, stone.

Geologic Water: Fossil groundwater aquifers.

Biological/Ecological Resources (functionally non-renewable): Topsoil, old-growth forests, biodiversity, coral reefs, major fish stocks.

  1. The first key insight is that modernity depends on many non-renewable materials, not just energy, and they are all critical for the technologies that enable modernity. Cactus is thus a much wider lens than the peak oil view.
  2. The second key insight is that modernity requires growth, not only because of the widely understood need for abundant credit as explained by the debt lens, but also because extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve qualities. This growth requirement is physical and non-negotiable, and unlike debt, is not digits in a computer that can be reset.
  3. The third key insight is that the requirement for growth, coupled with the inevitable decline in reserve qualities, creates a self-amplifying feedback loop for every one of the many non-renewable resources we depend on, which creates many possible failure points, and the extreme complexity and interdependencies of the technologies we use to extract minerals and energy guarantees a catastrophic failure of the entire system at some point.
  4. The fourth key insight is that this growth and collapse process is certain for any system that is dependent on non-renewable resources. This means there is no possible sustainable solution for advanced civilization anywhere in the universe, because advanced civilization is not possible without non-renewable resources.
  5. The fifth key insight is that there will be no recovery of modernity after the collapse. The quality of many of the remaining non-renewable resource reserves will be so low after the collapse that many resources will be unavailable without advanced technologies and abundant diesel, and there will be no way of rebuilding those technologies because their development required higher quality resource reserves. Surviving humans will return to their hunter gatherer origins.
  6. The sixth key insight is that the zero-sum game strategy that the debt and energy lenses inform our leaders to use, will reduce the time to collapse, and will not optimize the quality of life for the time that remains. War, for the last 10,000 years, was a good response to scarcity. War, today, will create scarcity for the entire planet.

Conclusions:

Given that our leaders see the world through debt and energy lenses, they are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game:

  • My country will do better if I damage the economy of my competitors.
  • My country will survive or grow if I take energy from my competitors.

The cactus lens shows us that a zero-sum game strategy will not achieve the desired outcomes.

Instead, zero-sum game strategies will reduce the time to collapse, or reduce the quality of the time that remains. Examples include:

  • Wasting resources, fragmenting the market, and decreasing efficiencies by trying to duplicate and reshore manufacturing.
  • Making it more difficult to maintain complexity by fragmenting the global trade system through the encouragement of BRICS and by imposing trade sanctions.
  • Wasting resources on bigger militaries that won’t help.
  • Wasting resources on climate change policies that won’t help.
  • Wasting resources by subsidizing renewable energy that won’t help.
  • Increasing the chance of violent harms to many by blaming other countries and/or immigrants for hardship caused by resource depletion.
  • Ignoring international law when it conflicts with a zero-sum goal.
  • Sanctioning Russian energy.
  • Blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
  • Restarting a nuclear arms race.
  • Risking disruptions to middle east oil flows, and destroying respect for leaders, by supporting the genocide of Palestinians.
  • Funding a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
  • Provoking China to withhold rare earth minerals.
  • Provoking China to stockpile oil.
  • Regime changing Syria.
  • Regime changing Iran.
  • Regime changing Venezuela.
  • Threatening to invade Nigeria.
  • Pissing off Canadians so not a one will buy a US product. 🙂

The cactus lens points us to a positive-sum game strategy.

Modernity is a global system of unimaginable complexity dependent on resources, technologies, processes, and skills sourced from 6 continents. A complex component will often travel back and forth between continents many times in the process of converting its constituent minerals into a finished product. Almost every country plays a roll in the complex web that sustains us.

Modernity depends on millions of interdependent components, each with a uniquely complex supply chain, and modernity’s aggregate supply chain is far too complex for any leader, or even a computer, to predict the consequences of disrupting the matrix to achieve a zero-sum game goal.

The risk of unintended consequences is high given that zero-sum game strategies will tend to focus on depriving energy and thus damaging the entire economy of an opponent country.

Plans to reshore manufacturing will make things worse. We don’t have the surplus capital or debt headroom needed to achieve this without damaging something else, and it will be very wasteful of non-renewable resources by creating capacity greater than the market can absorb, thus reducing the time to collapse.

The cactus lens shows us modernity will eventually collapse permanently, taking down every country in the process. There is nowhere to hide, and there is nothing we can do to prevent this. No country will be immune.

With cactus awareness and a positive-sum game strategy we could:

  • Make wise decisions that delay the collapse so we can enjoy more of modernity’s benefits, or at least avoid doing stupid things that accelerate the collapse.
  • Do some things to optimize quality of life until the end, or at least avoid doing stupid things that worsen quality of life.
  • Consider doing some things that might improve the quality of life for the post collapse survivors.

Actions that might delay the collapse and optimize quality of life until the end include:

  • Avoid conflicts and wars that harm citizens, damage supply chains, and waste non-renewable energy and minerals.
  • Stop the subsidy of renewable energy that wastes non-renewable resources and reduces the time to collapse.
  • Stop wasting money on climate change policies that will not change the outcome.
  • Put the Sulphur back into ship fuel.
  • Strengthen global governance and conflict resolution via UN like organizations.
  • Renew and improve treaties to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
  • Remove barriers to trade.
  • Encourage well regulated immigration to optimize global labor.
  • Allow market forces to optimize the global economy for maximum efficiency.
  • Adopt digital currencies to enable fairer and more efficient money printing, and to manage the fair rationing of scarcities.
  • Provide sound lifestyle and dietary advice with encouragements to help citizens improve their health and quality of life, and to reduce the healthcare drag on economies.
  • Fairly enforce laws to encourage law & order and good behavior.
  • Provide open and honest communication to citizens so they know what is going on and why, and no longer feel like they are being gaslit by wizards behind a curtain.
  • Provide meaningful and rewarding goals to citizens, like asking them to volunteer to rehabilitate habitats and soils to help post-collapse survivors.
  • When signs of the final collapse become visible, provide a painless end of life kit to any citizen that wants one to reduce their anxiety.

Notice that nothing on the above list requires a change in lifestyle for the majority, or the overriding of evolved behaviors like the Maximum Power Principle, or singing kumbaya, or sharing everything equally, or eating bugs.

Limits to growth are breaking our democracies. Citizens know their standard of living is falling, but do not understand why, so they vote for the politician that most credibly promises a better life, but leaders are powerless to improve living standards, which breeds politicians that are superb at lying, but not well suited to optimizing a complex problem. Then when the leader does not deliver, the citizen is pissed off, and next time votes for someone more extreme that blames the immigrants or the Chinese, and so on, which accelerates us in the wrong direction. The only way to break this path to despots is awareness.

With cactus awareness we will understand the comforts we enjoy are rare in the universe, are very fragile, and will soon be gone forever on this planet. This could lead to gratitude and care to not cause a premature collapse.

Cactus awareness will create strong pressure between countries, and by citizens on leaders, to not break things.

If we understand modernity will soon be gone for everyone no matter what we do, there will be less need to dominate and win, and more need to enjoy and cooperate to extend the good times.

Humans are an innovative species. With cactus awareness there would be many people thinking about what could be done to buy more time. Maybe we should use this resource for this rather than that? Opposition to change from people who have to give something up might be muted if they understood the change will buy a few more good years.

Some ideas to improve the quality of life for the post collapse survivors will be difficult to decide and implement because many of these will conflict with the goal of delaying collapse as long as possible. On the other hand, if we collectively understand collapse is inevitable, it might be easier to say set aside some forest or wildlife habitat, or bury nuclear waste, knowing that your children or grandchildren might benefit.

Imagine the effect of cactus awareness on philanthropy. What might billionaires with children do with their wealth if they understood modernity will soon be gone? Perhaps they might buy up biodiverse rainforests to protect them.

Shifting from the current zero-sum game strategy to a positive-sum game strategy will be very difficult.

Cactus is very unpleasant. Genetic denial, as explained by MORT, will be in full force resisting cactus awareness.

On the other hand, almost everything going on in the world today is also very unpleasant, and many people are losing their minds because nothing makes sense.

In a strange way, cactus may be less unpleasant than what we are currently asked to believe, because the cactus story at least agrees with what our eyes see, and provides reasons for gratitude when times are tough, so maybe there’s a chance for cactus awareness.

We evolved in small tribes that in times of scarcity had to fight other tribes to survive. There are no attacking aliens to unite us.

The cactus lens does point to a common threat that will kill almost everyone, but most people won’t believe it.

When times get tougher, as they surely will, leaders will have zero chance of adopting a positive-sum game strategy unless a majority of citizens see the world through the cactus lens.

Those of us that are cactus aware should start brainstorming how to spread cactus awareness.

Here’s one idea:

We could recruit the powerful institutions that were created by MORT: religions.

Cactus awareness will be fantastic for the life after death businesses. All religions will boom with growing memberships, donations, and tithes.

Religions therefore could be self-interested and enthusiastic allies for spreading the cactus gospel.

Religions also have the perfect infrastructure and skills needed to spread an idea like cactus and its positive-sum game belief system.

A likely roadblock to our leaders embracing the cactus lens is the big money behind financial institutions that depend on good news for their pump the bubble business model.

I’m thinking that it shouldn’t be too hard to get them on board. The cactus lens doesn’t say everyone has to live like poor monks in a cave.

Cactus tells us the end will be painful but mercifully quick, so those so inclined can party on like it’s 19991 in a glorious bubble until the last day…

1The highest net energy we ever enjoyed was in 1999 when about 4% of energy was needed to extract energy. Today it takes about 10-15% of energy to extract energy, and the ratio is continuing to rise.

What Should / Can / Could / Will We Do?

We’re in serious trouble. Many red lights are flashing on the dashboard.

Most people are now aware that something is seriously wrong, and each has their favorite lens through which to view the problems:

  • Geopolitical: increasing nuclear war risk, trade wars, genocide.
  • Political: polarized angry citizens, unstable governments, panicking/thrashing leaders.
  • Economic: end of growth, declining living standards, widening wealth gap, inflation, accelerating unsustainable debt, asset bubbles.
  • Environmental: accelerating climate change, species extinction, toxic forever chemicals, plastic waste, sick & dying trees from rising ground level ozone, etc.
  • Health: increasing obesity, autism, and chronic diseases, declining lifespans, increasing depression and mental illness.
  • Resources: peak food, peak oil, peak minerals, aquifer depletion, etc.
  • Energy: reserve depletion, rising extraction costs, falling EROI, export land model, no renewable substitutes for non-renewable fossils, etc.

The common denominator to all of these problems is overshoot.

Very few people are able to see through the lens of overshoot because overshoot is a very unpleasant topic with no painless solutions and no way to avoid its consequences, and because humans evolved to deny unpleasant realities like overshoot.

Grok: Biological overshoot occurs when a population exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, meaning it consumes resources faster than they can be replenished, leading to ecological imbalance. This is often seen in ecosystems where a species’ population grows beyond what the available resources (e.g., food, water, habitat) can sustainably support.

Causes: Rapid reproduction, lack of predators, abundant resources (temporarily), or human intervention (e.g., removing natural checks).

Consequences: Resource depletion, habitat degradation, population crashes, or ecosystem collapse. For example, a deer population might overshoot due to abundant food, then starve when resources run out.

Quantifying Overshoot: In ecology, overshoot can be measured by comparing population size N to carrying capacity K . If N>K, the system is in overshoot, often leading to a decline until N≤K.

Helpful Responses: Addressing overshoot requires restoring balance between population and resources.

What Should We Do?

I started this un-Denial blog 13 years ago after I became aware of our overshoot predicament, and a plausible theory by Dr. Ajit Varki for why almost no one can see the most important and obvious threat we face.

After a few years of discussing our overshoot issues I got tired of being a pessimist and wrote a prescription for what we should do. I thought it was pretty good at the time and represented a path that might actually help rather than the fantasy solutions with 100% probability of failing being promoted by millions of people with good intentions working on symptoms rather than the core overshoot problem.

My prescription for what we should do was in essence to minimize total suffering for all species by humanely reducing our population as fast as possible, and by planning and managing a controlled economic contraction, rather than allowing nature to force an uncontrolled collapse.

I understood that it would not be possible to implement my prescription unless the majority somehow could be made aware of our overshoot predicament, and this in turn required some method of overriding our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities. So I then spent several years promoting Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory in the hope that experts in relevant domains would work discover a method to override MORT.

My efforts were a complete failure. Not only did I not succeed in engaging any brain or behavior experts, I was not even able to recruit any like-minded colleagues in the overshoot space who were also trying to find solutions.

I sadly concluded that it was not possible to override MORT because denial of denial is the strongest form of denial, probably because evolution, for good reasons, ensures that the Maximum Power Principal (MPP) trumps all other behaviors.

What Can We Do?

In recent years the insights of Hideaway on the role of complexity in sustaining our civilization have caused me to question the theoretical feasibility of my or any other prescription.

Hideaway explains that the use of any non-renewable resource degrades the quality of its reserves over time, and this requires increasing complexity to sustain supply of the resource, which requires growing economies and population, which consume more supply, which worsens the reserve quality, which means any civilization dependent on non-renewable resources must grow or it will collapse, which means a hard collapse is unavoidable and no mitigation paths exist.

Hideaway’s probably correct but it’s a tough pill to swallow.

I’m still struggling to accept Hideaway’s conclusion because I can imagine many things we could do to worsen our predicament, like for example starting a nuclear war, or by burning our remaining coal and gas reserves faster by using AI to create more enjoyable porn.

Given that we could do many things to increase the coming suffering, it seems reasonable to assume there must be some things we could do to reduce the coming suffering, which I believe is the only sensible goal left to us.

But what are the things we could do to reduce total suffering for all species?

I would love to see the readers of un-Denial offer their ideas in the comments below. If we get enough good ideas I will collate them into another post with a new prescription representing our collective wisdom.

What Could Someone Do?

I’m a long time follower and admirer of Jack Alpert and have posted some of his best work over the years.

For many years Alpert’s been a lone voice advocating rapid population reduction with the goals of reducing suffering and retaining some of our best accomplishments as the only species with science and advanced technology.

I very much like the goal of retaining some of our best science and technology post-collapse because I have some insight into how rare and precious our accomplishments are likely to be in the universe.

In addition, if you have any doubts about the importance of Alpert’s goal to retain some of the more valuable features of modernity, this video on what life was actually like in ancient Rome will set you straight.

I was pessimistic about the feasibility of Alpert’s plan because it required educating sufficient citizens to vote for population reduction policies and I knew from my MORT observations and failures that his education plan would most certainly fail due to our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

Nevertheless, I still like Alpert’s plan because setting aside the political feasibility of achieving a quorum, it at least was technically feasible and did not break the laws of physics or deny the reality of non-renewable resources as every other “plan” by every other “expert” does.

There is of course now a new technical feasibility question created by Hideaway’s complexity theory. It may not be possible to retain some of modernity’s most valuable technology without the 8 billion scale of our civilization. Let’s hand wave this away for now because I don’t know the specifics of what Alpert proposes to retain, and we need to think harder about the implications of Hideaway’s complexity theory in the context of a population that falls really fast, perhaps so fast that the requirement for growing complexity to maintain supply no longer applies. Suggest we continue this discussion in the comments below.

I was recently pleased to see a revised plan by Alpert that no longer requires a majority of citizens to vote for population reduction policies.

We are underestimating our predicament and underestimating the behaviors needed to unwind it.

Human civilization maybe sicker than we think. Maybe we should consider stronger medicine.

Abstract:

Consider a line that describes the delivery rate of fossil fuels to civilization. Each higher rate each year supported an ever larger global population with ever grander lifestyles.

Unfortunately, earth’s crustal limitations suggest this rate of energy delivery will decline back to its 1750’s level this century.

Unless energy deliveries from solar, wind, hydro, geo thermal, fission, and fusion can come online and replace lost fossil deliveries, human population and lifestyles will also drop back to the 1750’s levels.

Civilization will experience first scarcity; then conflict; and finally a self-reinforcing feedback loop called a scarcity conflict death spiral which will starve to death or kill in conflict most if the people who live this century.

When the behaviors that prevent this die off cause their own significant injuries the condition is called a predicament because people are injured with or without the prevention behavior. 

In the last two minutes of this video I propose a behavior that causes much pain and prevents the injuries during civilization contraction. The video helps the chooser of the potential behavior quantify the injuries on each path.

After you view the video you may have important questions that need answers:

  1. Why do we have to make the transition in the next 80 years?
  2. Why can the earth (without fossil fuels) support only 600 million people living like serfs.
  3. Why does a new civilization that keeps our levels of arts and science support  only 50 million people living like moderns?

In this latest plan Alpert proposes that a single expert could engineer a contagious virus to sterilize the human population.

It seems plausible to me that a single scientist with defective denial genes could be found and recruited for this task. People who can see reality are rare but they do exist.

I do have, however, serious doubts about the technical feasibility of engineering a safe and effective sterilization virus given that it’s required to override life’s primary mission, and given that a trillion dollar pharma industry with an army of scientists was unable to engineer or manufacture a safe and effective gene therapy for a virus they created and had the blueprints for.

How is one rogue scientist going to engineer a safe and effective highly contagious virus designed to override the primary objective of DNA honed by 4 billion years of evolution?

Nevertheless, I’m an electrical engineer with limited knowledge of genetic engineering so perhaps Alpert knows something I do not.

What Will We Do?

Our most likely path is the path we are on which is to use every psychological, accounting, and technology trick we can think of to keep growing the size of our economy and the complexity it depends on until we reach the end of the runway and crash with a spectacular collapse of supply chains, complexity, food, and population.

Unfortunately there will be a lot of suffering for humans and other species. The planet and its diversity of life will no doubt recover, but it will never achieve the pinnacle of rare complexity we enjoy today.

As we accelerate down the runway stresses will increase within countries and between countries. You can see these growing stresses everywhere today. There is a high probability that our leaders will do something in desperation that reduces the length of the runway.

It is likely that our most powerful weapons will be used when citizens of a resource unlucky country become envious and angry. As one recent example, a petulant little island nation off the coast of France that is collapsing because its oil and coal reserves are depleted is trying to provoke a nuclear war with a much larger and more powerful country on the opposite side of a large continent because it has some oil and gas that might sustain the lifestyles and entitlements of the island nation a little longer.

There is another darker scenario now being publicly discussed by very competent geopolitical experts like Col. Larry Wilkerson. In this interview last week Wilkerson explained why he is very worried about the growing threat of a nuclear war and that he fears for his grandchildren.

Wilkerson also said he knows powerful people who believe the solution to overpopulation and resource depletion is to kill billions with nuclear weapons. You can listen to these comments at 42:30 but I’d start earlier at around 33:30 for important context.

In this light, Jack Alpert’s sterilization virus starts to look pretty good.

In case you are not aware of it, I recommend the 2013 TV series Utopia which was about a plot to reduce the population with an engineered virus.

book review: The End of Global Net Oil Exports by Lars Larsen (2024)

I just finished a book by Lars Larsen titled The End of Global Net Oil Exports: What Really Matters in the Peak Oil Debate, Thirteenth Edition, 2024.

Thanks to el mar for bringing this book to my attention.

Lars Larsen – The End of Global Net Oil Exports, 13th Edition – 2024Download

I thought I was aware of pretty much everyone that studies oil depletion but somehow I missed Lars Larsen.

I am both impressed and alarmed by his work. I expect you will be too.

Fair warning, the book is more like a collection of essays and blog posts, with some repetition because Larsen frequently revisits his calculations from different perspectives, or with alternate data, because the results are so troubling that they demand re-checking.

Larsen is 40 years old, lives in Sweden, has recently retired from 18 years of blogging, and his final post on his new blog has a nice primer on overshoot and prepping with many links to information. It seems Larsen copes with overshoot and collapse awareness by believing Jesus will return.

https://skogslars.blogg.se/

This blogpost is the end point of almost 18 years of blogging, the crown that crowns it. I have put a lot of effort into it. And I want it to be the most important practical, spiritual and prophetic information I can ever offer.

A big love adventure lies before us, and it is about returning to a simpler lifestyle, forced by the deepening collapse of industrial civilization, a collapse which is deepening at an accelerated rate, i.e. exponentially.

In this blogpost, my last one, I have tried to help you make the coming transition easier. 

To begin, I want to be clear that I am not an oil depletion expert. I have no first hand experience or research to validate the work of Larsen. It would have been better for an expert like Art Berman, Steve St. Angelo, or Hideaway to have reviewed this book, but given the importance of the topic, I will start the ball rolling and hope that more people look at Larsen’s work.

My small role in this world is as a dot connector of overshoot issues, with a unique focus on the MORT theory, which I think explains why we are collectively unable to see nor act wisely on our obvious overshoot predicament. I also like to think I am a reasonable judge of intelligence and integrity, which means I can sift wheat from chaff.

My sense is that Larsen is intelligent, with strong integrity, and has a lot of wheat.

Following are some aspects of Larsen’s work that impressed me.

Oil depletion analysis is complex and nuanced. It’s easy to get lost in the trees and not see the forest. Larsen focusses his analysis on what will likely be the most important trigger for collapse: the date when diesel becomes unavailable to import.

We can make do without some oil products like gasoline, however diesel is central to everything we need to survive because it powers the engines in our tractors, combines, trucks, trains, ships, and mining machines. Alice Friedemann elaborates on this in her excellent book When Trucks Stop Running.

There are many factors that affect oil supply and demand including technology, geopolitics, economic cycles, interest rates, inflation, wars, extreme weather, and pandemics. Larsen stays focused on the 3 most important forces driving oil depletion:

  1. Total Supply (new supply minus depleted supply times % diesel): Wells deplete over time and are replaced with new wells. New wells tend to deplete faster and often produce unconventional oil which has a lower percentage of diesel. We are also consuming reserves much faster than we are discovering new reserves.
  2. EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested): It takes energy to extract energy. We first exploit the best quality reserves with the easiest to extract oil. Over time reserve quality declines which requires more energy for extraction leaving less energy for powering everything else in civilization.
  3. Available Exports (Export Land Model): Oil producing countries tend to have strong economic growth which means over time they consume a larger percentage of the total oil they extract, which leaves less available for export.

Each of these 3 forces is now trending in a negative direction, and the rate of each is accelerating. Many experts discuss the implications of one of the three big forces, but Larsen is the first person I’ve seen try to calculate the combined effect of all 3 forces, which is of course what we care about, because the aggregate best predicts diesel availability over time.

Larsen acknowledges that the source data needed for his analysis is often confusing, incomplete, and inaccurate. He is transparent about this and does his best to validate data by cross checking and questioning assumptions.

Larsen is extremely well read and has clearly been studying oil depletion for a long time. His awareness of the work and opinions of other experts is encyclopedic. Experts he references include:

  • Jeffrey J. Brown
  • Gail Tverberg
  • Steve St. Angelo
  • Alice Friedemann
  • Art Berman
  • Kurt Cobb
  • Matt Simmons
  • Charles A.S. Hall
  • Richard Heinberg
  • Nate Hagens
  • Chris Martenson
  • Tim Morgan
  • Ron Patterson
  • Euan Mearns
  • Dennis Coyne
  • Andrii Zvorygin
  • John Peach

Larsen is open to criticism and revisits his calculations when challenged.

Larsen publicly corrects errors he has made in the past. This for me is a key sign of integrity which means we probably can trust him.

Larsen tries to avoid being an alarmist. He offers reasons that diesel might be available for a longer period of time. On the flip side, Larsen lists 10 forces that are not accounted for in his calculations and which might make reality worse than he predicts:

  1. Wars like Ukraine and the Middle East.
  2. Natural disasters like extreme weather events affecting offshore oil or coastal refineries.
  3. Oil reserves are probably overstated by exporting countries.
  4. Popping of the US shale oil bubble.
  5. Steep decline of conventional oil due to advanced enhanced oil recovery (a bigger straw).
  6. Insufficient capital for exploration due to green energy policies and/or economic recession.
  7. Economic collapse due to insufficient growth and extreme debt.
  8. Reserves left in the ground because rising extraction costs eventually exceed what consumers can afford to pay.
  9. Peak oil awareness may cause exporting countries to leave oil in the ground for future generations.
  10. Depleted exporting countries become importers thus accelerating the decline of diesel available to import.
  11. Hideaway, in an un-Denial comment, added an 11th issue. Modern oil extraction technology is very complex with many global networked dependencies. Given the nature of remaining reserves, it is not possible to use older simpler technology. When disruptions to supply chains begin they may cascade to accelerate the decline of oil supply.

A few comments on Jeffery J. Brown’s export land model (ELM). For those unfamiliar, the ELM says that export supply falls faster than total supply because oil exporters grow and therefore consume over time a greater share of the surplus oil they have available to export. I remember the ELM was widely discussed in the early days of peak oil. Now I rarely hear anyone like Berman, Hagens, Tverberg, Friedemann, Martenson, etc. discuss it. I wonder why? It seems like a very important model for predicting depletion of exports.

Larsen asks the same question about the ELM. He also ponders the same type of questions that motivated me to create un-Denial. How is it possible that we do not see or discuss the most important issues? It seems Larsen has not yet discovered Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory which provides an answer.

It’s very strange that people do not focus more on the end of oil exports than on peak oil and the decline of overall oil, when the fact is that the end of oil exports comes way before the end of overall oil.

Jeffrey J. Brown was the one who brought the issue of oil exports to the focus of many peakoilers and collapsologists ten, fifteen years ago. If you google for recent texts by him or interviews with him, you don’t find much, the latest by him or about him is only one article on Forbes in October 2021,”The Road To Clean Energy Is Messier Than We Thought”, written by Loren Steffy, UH Energy Scholar (not easy to find if you google for it), and after that you find on google some comments on http://www.oilprice.com from the beginning of 2018, and one interview from 2017 at the Peak Prosperity blog, see here.

After 2021 there is, basically, a deafening silence around him and from him. Why? Shouldn’t he become more and more famous the closer we get to the end of the oil export market? Shouldn’t all countries calculate oil exports and imports, so we can plan for the end of the oil age? So we could degrow in a controlled way, collapse in a controlled way, not in a chaotic way? This silence and disinterest is for me incredible, unfathomable stupidity. I can’t almost believe it’s true, so strange it is.

The same one could say about the whole issue of calculating oil exports according to the Export Land Model, it has just vanished from the scene, you don’t find anything about it since 2017 (this is still true on June 17, 2024, later comment). In fact, rationing the remaining oil, yes all the remaining fossil energy, is maybe the single most important thing to do in the whole world right now. And Peak Oil is the single most important event in modern time, or, maybe Peak Oil Exports (which happened in 2005, google “peak oil exports happened in 2005” and you only find one article about it, or, it is not even an article, it is a comment to an article. I wrote this in the end of 2022) is even more important, but it is linked to Peak Oil, which also happened at the same time, if you only count conventional oil.

We are walking blind and deaf over the “Energy Cliff”. Not even the current energy crisis and the record high energy prices are able to get us to explore oil exports according to the Export Land Model on the internet.

It would have been nice to know how much time we have left to live as a civilization, yes, even more as individuals. This can be best known by calculating the remaining volume of oil exports, if our country doesn’t produce any oil itself, and if we produce oil ourselves, by also calculating our remaining oil reserves and the volume of probable future oil discoveries.

If you are a dying cancer patient, you would like your physician to estimate how long you have left to live, so you can plan accordingly. In fact, it is the duty of every physician to try to figure this out and tell the results to the patient. And yet we usually do not calculate the time civilization and we ourselves have left. Shouldn’t we be interested in knowing this?

I noticed one assumption that Larsen makes that he never explains. He assumes China and India will be first in line for oil exports, and because they are large rapidly growing countries, many smaller oil importing countries will be pushed off the table and forced to collapse first. Perhaps their military might will place them first in line? Another possible explanation is that China and India are low cost manufacturers of necessities which means they will have something of value to trade for scarce oil unlike countries like UK/France/Germany/Japan etc., which after SHTF, may have nothing affordable of value to offer for oil so may not be able to import any oil.

Hideaway pointed out that if the shale bubble pops the US will probably try to use its military power to push aside China and India. This may explain the recent hostility to China by Europe/US with policies in essence to “keep China down”. This may also explain the insanity of NATO’s opposition to Russia’s reasonable security concerns. One can imagine much risk of nuclear war in the future. Starving citizens create motivated leaders.

Larsen pauses to ask if the conclusions of his calculations pass the smell test. Often he admits his conclusions seem too dire given day to day life, and then he rechecks, or proposes possible reasons reality may be less bad than he predicts.

I have done many different calculations, from different angles and with different parameters, to try to validate my results, and all calculations confirm my results above, more or less, all point in the same direction. I have counted them, and it is eleven different sets of calculations, all pointing in the same direction. Regarding the end of “ANE” (“available net ex-ports”) one say it will happen 2023, four say 2024, seven say 2025, six say 2026, four say 2027, one say 2028 and one say around 2030 (my starting point in the beginning of the book). “ANE” means global net oil exports minus the combined net oil imports of China and India.

I have serious trouble believing in my own calculations. They feel too radical. Maybe there is something wrong with the data or with my calculations (but I cannot calculate otherwise, I’m not an expert in math). Therefore I think 2027 is the most likely time for the end of “ANE” globally.

It is almost not possible to really believe that global oil exports are declining exponentially right now (i.e. at an accelerated rate of decline, which means that the decline goes faster and faster with time), as I have shown in this book (because almost no one talks about it, we do not want it to be true). This means that the collapse of civilization will also be exponential, going faster and faster. It means that it is exponential right now. Who can really fathom this fact? We have to be really deep into collapse news to be able to feel the realism of this. And I am. But I have still problems believing it, because I don’t see it happening in Stockholm, where I live. It happens elsewhere, though, to some degree.

This is not reflected on the site https://oilprice.com/, the most important website of the global oil industry. It is never mentioned. Even Peak Oil is seldom mentioned there. Almost only when Gail Tverberg is allowed to post the blogposts from her own blog there, which happens about once a month, the reality of Peak Oil is coming through. I follow this site regularly.

This is really bad for our adaptation to a post carbon future, which has to come, it is a mathematical certainty. It is also a mathematical certainty that the collapse will be exponential.

Larsen’s conclusion is that 2027 is the most probable year that diesel imports will become unavailable to all countries except China and India.

Diesel shortages will break everything that matters. Given our extreme $88 trillion global debt, complex global supply chains, and 12,100 nuclear weapons, it is impossible to predict how the collapse will play out.

But I expect food will be at the epicenter.

In about 3 years from now.

I wonder if this explains why most leaders seem to be losing their minds?

Coping with Awareness

Stellarwind72 proposed we write an essay on how to remain in good mental health while being aware of our overshoot predicament.

I have assembled here ideas from thirteen un-Denial participants plus my own.

If any reader would like to add their own list of tips, please send me a message and I will update the essay with your contribution.

14-Jun-2024 Friend Jack Alpert, who has developed the only viable plan to minimize suffering and retain some of our species’ best accomplishments, has contributed to this compilation.

ABC

The insights of yours truly, on how to engage with the predicament. 

“We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
– Richard Dawkins

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
– Thucydides

Both statements are correct, philosophically one might describe them followingly. 

Natural selection:

  • “Dao; The Way” 

Maximum Power Principle:

  • “Nietzsche; The Will To Power”

How to perceive the predicament?

  • Strive for power, as an act of self-preservation.

Death is indifferent.

  • What is there to lose?

Charles

We are waiting for the barbarians while getting a free ride and think we are in charge. 

It’s time for a doomer’s jubilee.

Yes, I am happy with what’s happening in the world. Whatever the outcome. Whatever the way it unravels. (Which doesn’t mean I don’t have problems which come and go and need to be solved, up and downs, fears and obsessions probably like many.)

I so wanted to share with you the ticket out of thinker’s hell, out of humanist’s hell. It turns out to be hard. It all seems so simple now, that I don’t even remember what exactly triggered a change of state.

I could try to recount my encounter with non-duality. I could list some of the leads I followed: Ramana Maharshi, UG Krishnamurti, Swami Prajnanpad, Ramesh Balsekar, Paul Hedderman. And, how one day, the whole mental edifice crumbled. The whole indoctrination of science, layers upon layers painstakingly acquired during years of learning, repetition and practice, nothing but rumbles. Not to be replaced.

Would it be understood (comparing science to a belief system is anathema to many: sometimes the only way to notice we are wearing a pair of glasses is to try wearing another one)? Would it be of any use? Isn’t one of the points that no generalization is possible, that every one’s experience is fiercely unique.

Maybe it’s the realisation that there is a limit to our ability to predict the future, or that the worst already happened (more than once) in the past (the Shoah, Native American genocide, …), or witnessing so many experts defending tooth and nail their own version of truth, or noticing that imagination of a dreaded outcome has nothing to do with the actual experience, or going through some hardships and realising that things just go on, or that the world is 1 without 2 (it is as it is and not some imaginary else), or seeing how tough life is on most people yet they somehow manage, or that it’s always all an experience, good or bad, it’s entertaining (like I am the station in front of which trains come and go and I have no agency on which type of trains or the schedule. So I might just as well enjoy the show), or realising the shallowness of the myths that have been stacked one upon each other (by religion, by science, by the self, by the mind, …) and for which we deploy so much fervour and energy.

Maybe it’s simply the recurring small encounters with beauty, with life. Gardening does that for me, fearlessly exchanging with people to reach the depths and truth of an aspect of their mental shape too (as we are doing now), or just greedily inhaling every small details reaching my small field of consciousness.

Or, it may just be getting bored of negativity.

As much as I had wished to share this state, it seems not to be really communicable. It will dawn on you, I am sure. And some day, you will be suddenly laughing out loud in the middle of the fields. If anybody sees you then, they will think all that worrying ended up getting the best of you. 🙂

Anyway, thank you for finding and periodically bringing to our attention smart people doing original thinking on this topic of collapse. I am grateful for your clear eyesight, your ability to separate the chaff from the wheat. Especially, it has been a great support during covid.

To conclude, here are the most important ideas I want to share:

Redemption, betterment, moksha, liberation, self-realization, illumination, enlightedment, progress, self-improvement, planet rescue… As if the world could be any different than it is. As if it could be improved upon. As if we had control. As if the dynamic of life were a math problem with an optimum solution. If you meet the Buddha, kill him. I say burn them all, Fahrenheit 451 style: Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Einstein, Malthus, the Meadows. They clutter our souls. Time for renewal. Snap out of any form of idealism, absolutely any kind of indoctrination. Now the earth was formless and empty. Go back there and start anew.

To me, it’s thinking which shapes our experience by arbitrarily slicing, labelling everything, arbitrarily picking a perimeter to focus on (identification), a start and an end, creating concepts: birth, death, progress, evolution, species, collapse, NPK (chemistry), MPP, MORT, you name it… That’s all delusional. There is no way anything can be understood. It is not meant to. And that’s fine. There is nothing to be either fearful, angry, saddened or cheerful about. It is just as it is. And that’s awe-striking.

As far as I understand, this is UG Krishnamurti, this is non-duality (not 2, which does not imply 1 either).

And then, there is all that matters, that which can’t be put in words…

el mar

el mar´s approach:

Take care!

  • Be friendly and balanced, don’t believe every bullshit.
  • Be peaceful, self-critical but don’t put up with everything.
  • “Come down”, think “small”, for species-appropriate human husbandry.
  • Buy regionally, support local producers, manufacturers and craftspeople. Eat healthy, fresh, unprocessed food
  • Start a kitchen garden. Start small.
  • Learn something crafty and practical.
  • Cooperate and share with like-minded people.
  • Listen to your inner voice – not to ideologues and pied pipers from the right and left.
  • Avoid mass consumption and mass media.
  • Inspire other people to join this movement.

Saludos

Florian

It’s pretty funny to me, I’m a “young person” (< 40 years) and I’m not following a single of Robs points.

I live in a big city (I was born here) and work in tech (which I enjoy within reason) and I can afford to only work 30h. In a slow collapse scenario I will have to trade my database knowledge for food lol but, personally, this is not the future I envision.

My own version of the future is a lot more bleak so I live my life of pleasure, sitting comfortably in my office hardly working knowing that it could end next month, year or decade. Which also has it upsides because I don’t need to worry about my retirement.

Gaia

Do you remember my post on suffering that you decided should be a guest essay (and that quite floored me to see my words the next day front and centre!)? My core outpouring then, and even more now, is the question, was it all worth it? That so few have benefited so much at the expense of so many? Even to the point of the destruction of our biosphere, endangering life systems at the macro and molecular level through our hubris in thinking we can grasp power and control far beyond our reach. In my darkest hours I feel that deepest, helpless, purging sorrow is the only true emotion we can justifiably claim; all other feelings and reactions to our existence are derivative of our denial that allows us to continue living so. It’s denial that keeps me as positive and equanimous as I seem to all around, if anything I feel an imposter as I should be more depressed and grieving for the world and humanity as a whole.
I consider this recent post a continuation of that lament on suffering and even more a personal outcry of remorse and regret that I was not as conscious of my role and responsibility in the greater good and suffering as I could have been, or if I was aware, I certainly was not courageous as I know is rightful in failing to use my one life boldly to declare justice as others have done.

As children, we naturally understand and feel injustice aggrievedly, possibly because we are otherwise helpless and dependent upon the goodness of others, but also in our naivete and innocence we trust that others know and care how we feel, and would treat us as we and they wish to be. Through a thousand thousand cuts of disappointment and breaches of trust, cog-turning assimilation into the culture and society into which we were born, it comes to pass that we throw off that banner of righteousness and justice in exchange for a yoke of resignation and complacency. We carry our burden with hardly a murmur, willingly or not, wittingly or not, so we can stake our claim of existence in this society upon which we are wholly dependent. To conform with the dominant tribe is our survival strategy, and the more complex our society becomes, it is clear that for the masses there is little choice but to continue the status quo or be cast out. We come to realize our relative individual unimportance to the system, so it is not much of a step to endorse anothers’ insignificance, especially those outside of our tribe. Then it is no matter at all to deny their right to existence, and all manner of injustices become justified. For all my complicitness of inaction, I shall bear my own guilt. It is through recognition of myself in the majority that will lead to my release of judgment for them, and if by grace I can come to some measure of forgiveness, I hope to absolve myself a little, too.

Truth to tell, at some level we know we are here because someone else is not, we have because someone else does not. My ancestors survived at the cost of another, and now I have my material life at the expense of another. There is no way else to balance this equation, however we try to reconcile it. It is all justified because we are who we are, and they are who they are–as in the developed world, complete and worthy, still deciding if the “developing” ones have a right to exist. The colour of our skin, the language we speak, the land we find ourselves, and most expediently, the exchange rate we decided upon, keeps everyone in their own respective domain and hierarchy of who shall have and not have. We call it fair trade to keep us in the West living in our high standard whilst those whose labour and resources we have stolen through our inflated dollars can only keep living in their degraded standards. Any child can see through this unfairness which we have called our globalised world. Genocide still may be abhorrent, but slavery, as long as it is at arm’s length, has its merits. I am a beneficiary of this and cannot and will not erase that stain upon my conscience. We need not wait for AI to overcome our humanity; we have already given away a greater part of that when as a species we chose to continue following the algorithms of power as a method for survival instead of allowing our still small voice of conscience to heed the golden rule. Until we embrace the earth as our village and kinship with all life, we are quite alone on this blue-green planet, spinning alone in this corner of the universe.

I contend that we all have the possibility of a Hitler as well as Mother Theresa–the only difference is quantity of intention and scope of action, but the quality is already in us. It must be so if we are a species together, the family trait of both runs deep and will out given the right circumstances. Our continued survival as a species has depended on at times dominance and exploitation, and at other times, cooperation and altruism. Daily we balance between the spectrum in all our decisions, whether consciously or not. As a species, we perhaps could never have evolved differently, but gifted with the birthright of consciousness and conscience, individually we could have chosen differently. We know it can be done because it has been done, we all have done it–have risen to the occasion of defending the defenseless, be it a rescued bird or standing for a friend against a bully. Courage in those moments is a direct line to our hearts, bypassing our brains working out what is in it for us. I daresay those are the times we felt most alive and sure of our purpose, the moments when we consider anothers’ well-being before our own. This quality of beneficence is every bit a part of our species as well, all we lack is consistency, which is the mark of mastery. Whilst some rare few may achieve instant enlightenment, the other path, however long and arduous, will also reach the goal through awareness and effort. We must be able to practice our kindness and goodness; it matters not how small the task before us as we have the quality already, it is merely the quantity we can choose to increase or withhold. We can choose kindness and rightfulness again and again, until it is no longer a choice but defines us.

Despite these physically, mentally, and emotionally draining times, I am going along as well as I can be, seizing the joy and wonder in every day as I know how precious life, and the passing time that unravels life, are. I now understand clearly why Cicero (considered a Skeptic, not a Stoic) stated that gratitude is the greatest of and the parent of all virtues. I find comfort in managing the daily tasks that so many wish they could do with as much freedom and ease as I have enjoyed all my life, and in helping others by being more generous with my time through practical action or listening ear. Giving back is the choice I am hanging onto for having the privilege of receiving so much. Knowing now as I do that our life of continued ease will be greatly foreshortened due to our own making, crystalises for me the certainty that my remaining days and choices are fast becoming last chances to consolidate what I have learned as a human being on this planet. And even more importantly, to prove to myself that my life has been an examined one and the highest version of what I can be. Whilst I cannot save humanity, I can still save the part of me that can be more grateful, kind, compassionate, accepting and forgiving. It is the only and true thing remaining for me to do, and for which my entire life was preparation.

Rob here, I’ve added to Gaia’s contribution a powerful paragraph she wrote as a comment a month ago:

The on-going genocide of the Palestinians really nailed it for me. Now we know that given the opportunity, we would act just the same way the majority of Germans did, in turning a blind eye to what we know is morally unjust and thinking we can continue with our own lives. We will watch the slaughter and deplore it, but why don’t we have the courage to upend our lives by doing something radical in effort to stop it? It’s the same for the response to Covid. It seems the most radical thing a Westerner can do (and more power to the pro-Palestine youngsters at universities who still have heart and guts) is publicly protest but why are we not all walking out of our jobs or going on hunger strikes and the like? What does it take to really take a stand, to deliberately override every instinct of survival by choosing suffering and even death (like Aaron Bushnell, who conflagrated himself) for an ideal? The drive to protect ourselves and just keep living the lives we are accustomed, especially us in the West is overwhelming–we have too much to lose and we know we cannot survive outside our system. We are workers in the hive, and we are programmed for only the hive. Knowing this, we finally come to understand that we are not free beings and never have been, but that does not mean we do not still have choice and our internal world can be closer to what we want to make it. That’s why the Stoic philosophy is particularly attractive to me; I have succumbed to relinquishing any hope of changing the outer world but I can still find meaning, purpose and joy in life by improving my inner self.

Hamish McGregor

There are no specific actions I take, to help with coping – unless being constantly negative, whining, passive aggressive and excess criticism (of everything) counts.

Hideaway

In working out where we are headed, I cope via a variety of mechanisms. We are a close family, my wife and our children, and we come from close families, so there is always the following of everyone’s progress through life as a positive to look forward to. We are financially well off, as I’ve invested well by predicting the way the world would try to head, given what I know of resources, which has allowed our children to have a much easier path. They are well aware of my findings and none of our children, in their 30’s, have chosen to have kids, so no grandchildren to worry about. They say they will just return to the farm when civilization collapses.

I have native areas of bush (forest for non Aussies) on our property that are regenerating from before we bought, 40 years ago. Taking a long walk through these areas gives a regenerative feel for the world overall. Life will go on after us, until it can’t, but will spring up somewhere else in the universe. Life is for living and I enjoy spreading the word of what’s happening in reality, so it doesn’t get me down at all. We have plenty of food, heat when necessary and great shelter that we built with our own hands. I cut wood from our bush for heating the house, mostly from storm damage, or dead/dying trees as the bush goes through it’s natural succession, so providing our own heat source in winter is also cathartic.

I get a type of internal peace knowing that there is no purpose to life, it just exists, so making the most of it with as many different experiences as possible in great company is what counts. being part of a like minded community of thinkers at un-Denial also helps with sanity as it clearly shows I’m not ‘out of my mind’ with my findings on the direction of the world, so thanks to all contributors at un-Denial and especially to Rob for hosting the site..

Jack Alpert @ https://skil.org/

I am not going to prep for the down slope for four reasons:

  1. There is no protection from the roving hoards. Both, preppers and non-preppers, will end up with nothing to eat but each other very quickly — probably in the next 50 years and most certainly in a hundred years.
  2. Running, hiding, and being the last man eating the last can of corn in the last cupboard is not what I want to work toward.
  3. I cannot drink a good glass of wine and watch the sunset without guilt.
  4. That I am old and I might make it out of here before tragedy strikes brings me no joy.

I will feel bad every day if I do not try to fix things I can see are broken.

Some fixes I do not care to work on. I am done being distracted by efforts to fix the miss perceptions and dysfunctional behaviors resulting from our limbic brain which evolved too slowly to keep up with our cognitive capacities to create civilization’s momentum.

My work focus each day:

  1. Define a viable Human Earth system in terms of behavior that controls  mass and energy flows that can exist continuously without degradation of the earth’s productive capacity.
  2. Define the collective behavior required to transition to this Human Earth system.
  3. Implement the required behavior:
  • i) Extracting bad behavior takers from the population:
    • a) Old age deaths
    • b) Starvation deaths
    • c) Deaths from violence
  • ii) Coerce the required behavior from the remaining population:
    • a) Physical enslavement
    • b) Social contract enslavement
  • iii) Create universal upgrade in cognitive processes in every living person.

Some milestones on this journey:

The existing 8 billion people living today will not be living in 2100. They will have died from:

  1. Old age
  2. Starvation
  3. Violence

The human population that exists in 2100 will be the sum of births after today. If the system that is viable under the above definitions is only 50 million that means births will have to be limited to about 500,000 a year.

If we have only natural births, not test tube babies, that will initially be only 1 birth for every 140 woman, but will increase until it reaches 2.00 in 50 years.

Implementing this will be a challenge.

At one extreme it will require immediate sterilization of 8 billion people with some mechanism for refertilization to get 500,000 annual births.

This path creates great injury and can only be selected when compared to the worse alternative of an estimated 13.4 billion people dying of starvation and conflict during the next 80 years on the present path.

The rest of the transition is equally painful and difficult to implement.

I expect that existing cultural machinery will struggle and probably fail in making a transition to the defined viable civilization. It is more likely to descend into a dark age — probably with little chance of recovery to present science and technology.

Some other more powerful transition mechanisms may be applied by groups or individuals to our predicament. Individuals may soon become powerful enough to sterilize the 8 billion. Others may become capable of culling any portion of the 8 billion.

These options may be implemented (not abiding current ethics) with much lower total lives or environments injured.

These alternative paths forward for the human experiment on earth may be selected and implemented  independent of existing organizations.

I have worked my entire adult life understanding the creation of cognitive processes that if they were universal among the 8 billion, the collected behavior to implement a viable earth system would be possible. Each individual behavior would result with the same reliability as that individual selecting to not step off the curb in front of a rushing bus.

I have made much progress but lacking a quick and universal way of inserting these cognitive abilities into a whole global population over night I imagine the individual-produced interventions of sterilization and culling to be implemented to avoid the unrecoverable dark age on our horizon.

marromai

As far as I can see, it always comes down to the same thing: oneself is powerless when it comes to the big picture, you can only make sure that you and your loved ones are doing well. That’s also what I try to do as best as I can (like the closing words from my first guest post – carpe diem).

My coping methods are:

  • I am present at work because I need the money, but I only do the minimum required. I know that our economic system is doomed, but I cannot survive without it because I am inevitably a part of it.
  • I avoid the mass media and scrutinize any news.
  • The state is not my friend. I avoid contact wherever possible. State rules and laws are interpreted as flexibly as possible to my advantage (of course only where they don’t harm other people).
  • Most people don’t know what I know or dismiss it as nonsense. I keep my knowledge to myself and don’t try to “convert” anyone.
  • Current “Science” is just another religion – I know that I know nothing. However, (old) science offers us models and techniques that explain many things well or have made them possible in the first place. I use these where it makes sense to me.
  • I am not afraid of death, because I will return to the big picture – only dying could be unpleasant…
  • We will never understand the big picture, because as long as we are alive we are a split-off part of it, and can therefore never observe it in its entirety.
  • “I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to.” (Donnie Darko)

But nonetheless:

  • Try not to worry too much – as long as I can survive this day, the next one will also be possible. It’s like an incremental approach on living 🙂

To conclude with a quote from “A Book for No One“:

We should stop sinking into depressive moods we have created and start enjoying life in the here and now. The doomsday fantasies are due to the phase of prosperity, in which the human brain looks for new problems because our fundamental needs have already been satisfied. Even in ancient Rome, doomsday prophecies and the proclamation of new ages were booming – and yet the Romans lived relatively well for centuries without apocalyptic upheavals.

nikoB

nikoB’s farm

1993 was when I first became aware that progress (as we in the west generally think of it) was not really leading us to this consequence-free wonderful utopia in the not too distant future. The first was witnessing first hand, the clearfell logging occurring in forests across Australia. The second event that got doubts flowing in my head was my uncle casually remarking – what are we going to do when oil runs out?

Over the next decade I was a rampant greenie, studying ecology and horticulture but not really putting much of the bigger picture together. Climate change was a problem but still so far away – so fixable. That was all to change when a friend invited me to a lecture by Richard Heinberg and David Holmgren. Peak oil came and put a stop to all my illusions. The door was opened and I stepped through.

It was 2006 and I was in my mid-thirties with a young family just starting out. It wasn’t long before I was aware of the Oil Drum, Nate Hagens, Jim Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, The Druid JM Greer, the Chris Martenson crash course and many, many other places of ideas and discussion. To say this altered my thinking on everything is a massive understatement. Priorities changed overnight and I launched myself into a personal crusade to bring the truth of the peril that awaited us to anyone who would listen.

So fast forward to today, to cut through what is really a fairly dull story with maybe a few juicy details, I basically learnt that no one gives a “solidly digested meal” about resource depletion and overshoot. No matter how many ways you approach the subject. For it became a passion to try and work out the magical key that will unlock humanity’s thinking. All it did was result in the loss of close friends and family. I was mostly just a downer to people when I used to be one of the funniest people in the room (thanks to class clown training).

So where does this leave me now nearly 20 years later of being a peak oiler and recent anti-vaxxer. Reevaluating everything I do because what I have been doing hasn’t yielded results in changing minds.

I am lucky to be blessed with a partner who shares much of the same view of overshoot and its consequences. We spend quite a substantial amount of time discussing all the issues it brings bubbling to the surface. I am also blessed in that she shares the same passion for self sufficiency living that I do and together we work our little farm in the hinterlands of the northern rivers area of New South Wales Australia.

What I am slowly coming to the realisation of, is that we must not lose our passions, humanity and connections. For too long they were side lined and sacrificed for the greater virtue of telling everyone just how it is. The loss I felt was immense but that was balanced by the anger that I felt that nobody could see that what I think is so bloody obvious and that no one cares to do anything about it.

So in order to repair broken relationships (because I miss them) I have had to change my priorities and my thinking as well I suppose, so that I don’t just naturally clash with most people. This is difficult, especially not judging people for their ignorance and self destructive behaviours. But as it turns out I have all my own ignorant self destructive behaviours.

Maybe time is short before collapse makes living a nightmare, Hideaway makes many compelling arguments that this complex system is exceedingly brittle and can only withstand so many spanners thrown into the gears. Or perhaps the druid is right and that the collapse is catabolic, step by step, some big, some small but pretty much all down hill. Either way my thinking has changed on how to deal with it, though I must say the covid saga produced a huge detour and removed many friends from my circle and I would venture to say that most are not destined to return. But now I am getting back on track to living while compartmentalising the potential horror of a potential future.

I have decided to let go of the major criticisms I have of the human condition which are beautifully spelt out here in Rob’s blog over and over again. I don’t know if any of it really matters as we are all dead in the end. It is the journey as they say that matters not the destination. If we really think about it we know that is true as the destination is a hole in the ground.

So now I look to seeking the connections I can find with people that are easy to build on and see where it leads. Time to encourage rather than discourage. Soak up the interpersonal transactions and notice when something deeper occurs. But at the same time I won’t gladly immerse myself in exchanges full of bovine discharges.

As a focus for my own passions, I am back to making music, finding the humour in most things without resorting to be overly sarcastic or caustic. Observing and appreciating absurdity is great for that. Giving love as much as I can and forgetting the anger and the hate. I won’t pretend that it is easy but it does seem to be the most beneficial path and I must remember to forgive myself if I stray from it at times.

Paqnation (aka Chris)

Surprisingly, our story was more depressing to me when I was in full Daniel Quinn sustainable/wisdom mode. The whole “where did we go wrong” thing haunts you when you know humans “can” get it right. Now that un-Denial has set me straight on some of these core issues, our story is less depressing in that respect. I do think denial is at the heart of the matter, but I bounce around on how much emphasis to put on MORT, eToM, and MPP. And I am now slowly shifting to a new state of mind where it’s all about energy constraints and you can pretty much throw everything else out the window.

Society can be full of Quinn type worldviews or full of overshoot, MORT aware citizens. It doesn’t matter. Once those sacred constraints are broken, there is no way out of the madness. And there is no way to resist using this new energy technology because if you don’t, someone else will, and you will be conquered and/or killed. By the time your civilization has enough EROEI to start understanding concepts like overshoot and sustainable vs unsustainable… it’s too late. You are now way too addicted to the comforts of this energy surplus to voluntarily decrease usage. And you’re already in massive overshoot because of all the self-induced damage to your environment (mining and domestication of plants/animals). Ditto for your worldviews too. Separation of nature along with a superior way of looking at your own species are unavoidable default worldviews that come along with busting through energy constraints. The most depressing thing for me nowadays is the realization that this kind of modern intelligence (cleverness) has no purpose in the entire universe.

I have two techniques for my sanity. One thing is trying to accept the inevitability of it all. Understanding that the best-case scenario for Mother Earth is NTHE, helps me to go with more of a “I might as well partake in the Peak before it’s all gone” mentality. But the most important technique is hanging out on this website. When I first came onto the scene of un-Denial, I was shot out of a cannon. The two years prior that I was learning about overshoot, etc., I never had a reliable outlet to ask any questions. That all changed when I got here. I cannot talk to anyone in my personal life about collapse, but now I have an online support group. The following is more of a love letter to you guys for how much you’ve given me and my appreciation for being part of this Tribal Connection.

Here are some quotes I collected from un-Denial comments that caused me think and increased my awareness:

Monk: Something that helps me a lot is when I see dumped rubbish, which happens a lot in “magical NZ”. And I just think to myself how excited I am for collapse, because spoilt brat humans don’t deserve everything that we’ve got when we can’t even do something so basic for nature as pointing rubbish in the bin.

Rob: For the last 10,000 years we broke through normal resource constraints with agriculture (bigger share of solar energy) and fossil energy (ancient solar energy) and became a destructive unsustainable species, that is smart enough to know better, but denies what it is doing.

Mike: In a climax ecosystem, the system appears to be in balance with all species living in harmony. But it’s an illusion and no species intended it that way. Quinn probably got it wrong, in that respect. (Chris here, Mike calling out Quinn like that was the beginning of my internal temper tantrum)

Gaia: So over time, the ascendancy of lighter skinned humans in the cooler climates prevailed and these were the climates where agriculture and feudal living flourished, cementing the dominance of this culture type rather than the nomadic style of earlier hunter/gatherer societies which matched well with the grassland/savannah fauna of equatorial Africa.

Rob: The probability of getting 100% of things wrong by mistake is 0%.

Monk: They dug up a lot of roman prepping gold in villas in the UK. Funny to think of them prepping all that gold and never getting to use it.

Hamish: Too many people treat dogs like fashion accessories and discard them immediately when they have health issues.

NikoB: I always think of it in terms of give and take. What did you take from this world in order to live and what did you give back?

AJ: …reinforcing my opinion that the grandchildren of the victims of genocide are now the perpetrators of genocide.

Charles: I love watching the activity in a compost bin, on the surface of a decomposing carcass, the eerie colours of mushrooms feeding off dead logs… Death doesn’t really feel like an end: there is so much activity going on, and (in good temperature and moisture conditions) recycling happens so fast one can almost witness the migration of energy.

Rob: I envy people who obtain comfort from believing there is some form of spirituality in the universe that cares about us. Unfortunately I see a flow of electrons looking for a home.

Gaia: That’s just it, Rob! I identify best with being a bunch of electrons looking for a home! …Then the electrons I borrowed can go do something else for the rest of eternity.

Stellarwind72: What if intelligence over a certain level is inherently maladaptive on long timescales, because it allows you to destroy the very ecology you depend upon.

Hamish: If I ever have to turn away people seeking help, I will offer them my thoughts and prayers – that seems to be the solution to all calamities from the shit stains in Washington DC and state capitals.

ABC: “Progress” equals to mental regress in many if not most aspects, nothing short of “wickedness”.

Florian: If you are happy with what you have or even downsize then you are, from an evolutionary perspective, a defective individual and the chance is very very high that you will be thrown on the genetic trash heap. There is this saying, To understand all is to forgive all and while it can be hard to not show emotion in this absolute cluster-fuck there is absolutely no point to attach yourself to an outcome.

Charles: Life, to me is a constant invitation (sometimes quite painful) to open up to possibilities.

Rob: I’m still fascinated by denial. I see it every day in every single person I interact with. No one speaks reality, except the few that hang out here.

AJ: The lack of humility and stating that one could make a mistake, always makes me suspicious of a person’s conclusions.

Monk: Without fossil fuels the planet would have become a frozen wasteland. It looked like earth was heading for permanent ice age because too much carbon got lock up.

Rob: I believe one of the reasons we had so much coal is that large plants were enabled by the evolutionary invention of lignin and it took quite a while for fungi to figure out how to digest lignin. Today coal would not accumulate in the same quantities.

Notabilia: Remember, none of us fossil fuel colossi have to stick around when our inherited profligate way of existence hits the ground below the cliff. That will become the one remaining “civil right”. (Chris here, this one got me focused on writing my exit strategy article)

ABC: Wisdom has no inherent value in a world of energy, and never stood a chance against unhinged violence.

NikoB: Perhaps having a good spice rack will put those cannibalism fears to rest.

Stellarwind72: Our leaders seem to think that if Putin is allowed to win in Ukraine, he will invade several other countries, similar to what Hitler did after the Munich agreement.

Gaia: Maybe we can even say that MORT (denial) has been our species’ only true religion, for through it we almost became like the gods, or more poetically, it was the way in which the gods could become human.

Charles: I believe Quinn/Murphy’s story will propagate because it shows a possible way ahead for survival. It is becoming useful in this world of limits, of civilisation/technology collapse.

Hideaway: Crocodiles have existed in pretty much the same form for 200 million years, that’s long term sustainability.

Monk: Anthropologists do think pre-historic people had a lot more sex than their civilized counterparts.

Charles: I find the terms reincarnation and “life after death” misleading. They are too loaded. One should perhaps use “informational remnant through structural reorganization”.

Hamish: I’ve given up on the idea of saving people, society, knowledge, culture, wisdom. If I can help nature that will be enough.

Rob: The problem is our citizens, not our leaders.

Hideaway: Increasingly I’m thinking most major solar and wind installations are nothing more than a scam paid for by subsidies from the government, then quickly sold to whatever pension fund that wants ‘green’ credentials in their portfolio.

Stellarwind72: If MORT is true, the story of humanity will turn out to be a tragedy. The species intelligent enough to realize it is in overshoot doesn’t do much about it due to denial.

Rob: Life is not some spiritual mystery, but rather a predictable outcome of the fact that the universe abhors an energy gradient, and life is its best mechanism for degrading energy. (and) “If life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest, death is nothing but that electron come to rest.” (Rob here, I think that’s a paraphrased quote from Dr. Nick Lane)

Chris here. These next two get me emotional and make me think about what could’ve been (Closest to me ever having my own family was in 2003, but we both agreed on abortion. One of my biggest regrets).

ABC: I’d like to have a family, rear children and experience being a father. I know it is extremely selfish if not cruel by all definitions knowing our predicament, however I cannot shake this primal biological urge of self-interest and naïveté of having a “sense of meaning”.

CampbellS: We saw the southern lights, aurora astralis, here in the Far North of NZ. First time for me in my 53 years. Pretty spectacular and awe inspiring. Was nice to share it with my teenage kids.

And this is a nice little moment between the young, cocky Skywalker and the much wiser Obi-Wan Kenobi. They could both see the magic early on:

Paqnation: I actually think he/she is Art Berman, Simon Michaux or someone like that. I have a hard time with energy (which is why I love Sid Smith), but Hideaway is like an energy oracle.

Rob: Hideaway is better than both Berman and Michaux. Berman is deeper on oil but shallower on other energies and overshoot. Michaux has some worrying woo-woo.

One final note. While going through all my comments, I came across what is by far the most MORT thing on this entire website = My anti-pornography article. 😊

scarr0w

My journey to tranquility ( 🙂 ) is as follows:

I’ve known for as long as I have memory that I was “different”. Not exactly on the spectrum, not genius, not sociopath, but maybe a dash of each. I was in parochial school my first four years, and it was not a good fit for me. To get along, one should just fill in the answer blanks in your Baltimore Catechism workbook, not ask the nun to explain grace. Questioning the pablum we are spoon fed is not a way to be one of the gang.

Anyway, from childhood experiences, I over time built a mental outlook that more or less has evolved to be expressed best by the Niebuhr/Wygal serenity prayer. I generally kept my own council, especially when I fully realized the overshoot predicament we are in while working for a company that builds stuff for the fossil industry. I guess you could say I was “in the closet”.

Serenity, or at least equanimity is not an easy thing to maintain all the time, but I’ve gotten better over time. Raising kids, staying on the treadmill even after realizing that’s what it is, etc… can test your resolve. While I follow collapse progress and analysis at sites like Rob’s and several others, it is more to keep current, not to perseverate on (and let’s face it, being witness to this huge event in the human story is fascinating). Mostly I am grateful that I was lucky enough to be born in a location and time that will never be again.

Currently, some mental energy is on local political issues (I’m on the county board, trying to see opportunities to shift policy into more future ready states), but primarily I try to slowly make a few acres of land more in tune with what the local biome wants to be. That will be enough.

I liked a lot of what others said, especially Gaia, but since my emotion circuits were partly burnt out as a kid, I just don’t get wound up over the path out culture has chosen, or my role in it. I know others suffer and indirectly I benefit, those of us aware just have to live with a foot in both worlds, slowly reducing our complicity as best we can. Not much help for others, but that’s where I am.

Stellarwind72

Being overshoot aware constantly weighs on me. Given my young age (I was born right before the turn of the millennium), I know that the sh*t will hit the fan in my lifetime. From time to time, I feel existential dread. I know that there is a substantial risk of me dying early due to the effects of overshoot and collapse.

Sometimes just being able to talk about this issue with other people helps me with anxiety, knowing that there are other people who are aware of what is going on.

I sometimes like listening to classical music and taking hot baths to calm my nerves, but given how those are both dependent on large amounts of surplus energy (I mostly listen to classical music on YouTube), I don’t know how long I will be able to keep doing that.

Rob Mielcarski

In no particular order of importance, here are some things that have helped me remain partially sane with overshoot awareness.

Collapse Early and Avoid the Rush

There is no way to predict which of the many paths we will take (inflation, deflation, war, confiscation, theft, etc.), however we know with certainty that the destination of fossil energy depletion will be less material wealth, less food abundance, a lower energy lifestyle, and much less help from governments.

I think it is a wise strategy to voluntarily downsize your lifestyle and learn to live happily with less so that when everyone else is shocked and losing their minds due to loss of wealth and entitlements, you are already happily living the new normal.

Some things that have worked for me include:

  • Pretend you can’t buy gasoline and see how little driving you can get by with.
  • Stop flying. Find ways to vacation locally like camping.
  • Monitor your electricity consumption in real time and practice using less.
  • Practice food storage and preparation without refrigeration.
  • Practice low energy cooking like one-pot meals and pressure cooking.
  • Practice living at lower temperatures in the winter.
  • Shower when dirty, not every day.
  • Change clothes when they are dirty, not every day.
  • Stop eating out. Cook all your food from scratch.
  • Cut your own hair.
  • Maintain your vehicles yourself.
  • Practice fixing things that break.

Local Food

I think we face 5 main threat vectors and it is unclear which will strike first:

  • nuclear war (due to resource scarcity)
  • accelerating warming (due to aerosol reduction)
  • asset bubble crash (due to extreme debt and degrowth)
  • energy scarcity (due to depletion of low-cost non-renewable reserves)
  • deadly covid variant a la Bossche (due to our idiot unethical leaders)

The most important common denominator is likely to be food scarcity.

I once had a dream to buy a farm and build a doomstead. I took a small scale farming course and after about 5 years of employment as a farm laborer I learned that I lacked the money and the passion and the time to pull it off successfully. So I switched to plan B. I now assist a local farm with construction and maintenance in return for a source of local food. I still buy the majority of my calories at the grocery store but I know we can ramp up calorie production when SHTF.

Prepping

I work hard at being a wise frugal prepper which means I stock things that:

  • I like to eat and have a good shelf life so they won’t be wasted
  • are likely to become scarce first like protein, fat, and caffeine
  • are essential for good health
  • are purchased when on sale to save money

I maintain a detailed spreadsheet of consumables with quantity, cost, date of purchase, best-by date, storage location, date opened, date finished, and predicted duration the item will last. This allows me to:

  • track my consumption of each item so I can accurately predict how long each will last, and to adjust inventory levels based on my assessment of world events
  • track price inflation and to stock more of what is expected to inflate fastest
  • rotate inventory so I always eat the oldest first
  • conduct shelf life tests and record results so I know when a best-by date can extended or ignored
  • calm down – reviewing my spreadsheet reduces my stress

I have methodically gone through every durable item and service I use and asked what will I do if that item breaks and cannot be fixed or replaced, or can’t be fueled. For those items that I consider essential I have purchased a spare, or I have plan for accomplishing the same thing a different way, or I know I can do without. Here are a few examples:

  • my town water supply is not gravity fed and depends on electric pumps so I installed a hand operated pitcher pump on an old shallow well on my property
  • I can light my living area with 4 different types of energy
  • I can cook with 7 different types of energy
  • I can heat my living area with 3 different types of energy and I have practiced living with the thermostat at 15C
  • I have 4 different modes of transportation and I have some spare parts
  • I can keep my refrigerator operating, which is the main thing I care about in a power outage, for a couple weeks
  • I have spare parts to keep my computer, which is my main indoor hobby, going until I’m dead
  • I have spare hiking boots, which is my main outdoor hobby, to last until I’m too old to hike

Doing something to prepare provides a sense of agency over things out of my control which improves my mental well-being.

Prepping is of course not a fix to permanent scarcity or a catastrophe, but it might sustain life during a temporary shortage, and it might make life more enjoyable when non-essential but highly valued items like coffee become unavailable.

Prepping can be a good use of limited savings given that inflation is a likely outcome of energy scarcity. I smile every time I see price increases on things I have in inventory.

Health

When things get tough, good health will be one of our most important assets.

Most available employment will require manual labor, and if you’re out of shape and overweight you may be unemployable.

I expect pensions and safety nets to vaporize so many will be forced to work until they die.

I expect the availability and affordability of health care services to decline as governments become impoverished.

Covid taught me that I do not want to use our unethical and incompetent healthcare system if I can avoid it.

So I try to maintain good health by:

  • eating healthy unprocessed, low sugar foods
  • fasting 16 hours every day
  • getting some exercise
  • sleeping 8 hours
  • taking a few critical supplements like vitamin D and C
  • no alcohol or tobacco

Gratitude

Someone wise said something like “the foundation of happiness is gratitude”.

I believe it.

The lifestyle of the poorest Canadian is better than a pharaoh. It is easy to forget how lucky we are in the rich western countries at this point in history.

The majority of my good fortune came from being born in Canada, not from my skill or hard work.

So I try to be grateful.

A few things that work for me include:

  • cook deliberately: I plan my meals, and I think about the path the food took to get to my kitchen, and I try to show respect to the food by cooking it nicely, and wasting nothing
  • eat deliberately: I try to slow down and appreciate what I am eating
  • drive deliberately: when I press the accelerator I think about the miracle of fossil energy
  • shower deliberately: I think about the path the water took to get to my house, and the energy it took to heat the water, and what a luxury a hot shower is

Learn to Enjoy Your Own Company

I spend quite a bit of time alone for several reasons:

  • I find it easier to “collapse early and avoid the rush” when I am not surrounded by people competing for status
  • nobody likes being around a doomer, I’m invited less these days
  • I struggle to chit chat about things that do not matter
  • I have become less tolerant of people who believe nonsense and are incapable of changing beliefs regardless of evidence – yes I know MORT is often the cause, but I still don’t enjoy the company of people in denial

So I have learned to enjoy my own company.

I have conversations with myself, and I listen to interesting (and sometimes aware) people via podcasts and audiobooks, and I interact with a few nice and aware people at un-Denial.

MORT

When you become overshoot aware you realize there is near zero awareness and zero discussion in society about anything that matters, and not only are we doing nothing that a wise species should do, we are doing everything possible to make our predicament worse. This can be crazy making.

Understanding Dr. Ajit Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory has been a big help to maintaining my mental health because it provides a scientific explanation for why almost everyone in the world, including our brightest intellectuals and all of our leaders, are oblivious to everything that matters.

If I Was a Young Person

If I was a young person, knowing what I know now, and wondering what to do, I would:

  • not live in a big city
  • avoid occupations that depend on discretionary spending (except maybe brewing beer and distilling alcohol)
  • learn a useful skill that poor people will need and value
  • learn a skill that can be performed with today’s complex power equipment, and yesterday’s simpler manual equipment
  • I’d personally lean towards a trade like carpentry, plumbing, masonry, electrician, roofer, mechanic, etc. but I’m sure there are many other viable occupations
  • farming would be good but land is too expensive for most people to buy today; a good compromise is a skill that generates income and a home garden or rented community garden plot that you tend after work; or if you are passionate about farming, join a good farm as a laborer and work up to a position with responsibility

The Great Reset: An Alternate Theory

In my last post I speculated that covid was a plan orchestrated by the heads of the important central banks to provide cover for printing a gazillion dollars to head off an imminent economic collapse, and to implement tools like digital currencies and lockdown mechanisms that will be useful for maintaining social order when money printing eventually fails and the economy collapses.

In that post I asked the key question:

What force is powerful enough to synchronize senior leaders in most countries to do the wrong thing on almost every covid action without assuming every leader is evil and/or stupid?

I stated that those of us paying attention and not listening to the official narrative know that nothing about covid makes sense.

Here is a brief summary of the covid facts and actions that do not make sense and that together suggest there is an objective other than public health in play:

  • no investigation or consequences for China and it’s Wuhan lab that engineered the virus
  • no investigation or consequences for the funders of the Wuhan lab work
  • Fauci kept in the most powerful healthcare position in the world, despite his involvement in funding the virus research and the subsequent coverup
  • no gain of function research policy changes to prevent a recurrence
  • no consequences for grossly incompetent WHO policies that encouraged global spread of the virus in the early days
  • suspiciously short and record time to develop a novel vaccine technology
  • all 4 vaccine manufacturers use the same (probably bad idea) mRNA code
  • suspicious vaccine patent history
  • probable fraudulent vaccine approval process and attempt to hide it for 75 years
  • insufficient testing to determine mRNA longevity and locations of activity in the body
  • willingness to rapidly deploy a novel insufficiently tested vaccine technology to billions at low risk from the disease including pregnant women
  • confident claims that vaccines are safe and effective despite being unwillingly to unconditionally approve the vaccines
  • indemnification of vaccine manufacturers
  • aggressive censorship of covid policy debate
  • aggressive character assassination and career destruction of dissenting experts
  • no updates to mRNA vaccines despite being ineffective against current variants
  • boosters recommended despite risks of infection, hospitalization, and adverse reactions increasing with each subsequent shot
  • elimination of non-mRNA vaccines from the market
  • ignoring 50 years of knowledge and discounting the risk of promoting vaccine resistant and/or more virulent strains by vaccinating in the middle of a pandemic with a non-sterilizing vaccine
  • no cost benefit analysis on lockdown policies
  • testing methods that grossly overstated the prevalence of disease
  • reporting methods that grossly overstated the severity and risk of disease
  • data manipulation that grossly overstated the effectiveness of vaccines
  • passports required for vaccines that are ineffective at preventing transmission
  • no passports given to people with naturally acquired immunity
  • zero promotion of effective disease prevention methods like vitamin D and weight loss
  • aggressive promotion of ineffective disease prevention methods like mask policies that did not prevent and probably encouraged disease spread
  • blocking of all effective early treatments including those profitable for pharma
  • strong arming countries like India & Japan that developed successful prophylaxis and early treatment protocols from disclosing what they did
  • preventing doctors from treating patients by blocking fulfillment of prescriptions
  • ignoring record numbers of adverse reactions confirmed by different systems in different countries
  • avoiding autopsies to determine causes of suspicious deaths
  • gaslighting and not supporting those suffering from adverse reactions
  • no adjustment to policies or admission or error regardless of evidence

I argued that if we assume that most of our leaders are not evil and/or stupid then the only plausible explanation for their behavior is that they are working as a team to prevent harms worse than those being caused by their covid policies.

Those of us that study human overshoot know that 8 billion people depend for survival on rapidly depleting non-renewable, non-substitutable resources, and that the only reason our global growth dependent system functions today is that we deny limits to growth by accelerating the use of unrepayable debt, and we know that emerging inflation will soon force a day of reckoning via an economic reset.

This day of reckoning will harm many people. Most citizens will be surprised and unprepared. If citizens respond with violent social unrest then the harms will be magnified. Hence the urgent need for tools to manage a collapse such as:

  • lockdown tools to prevent rioting
  • lockdown tools to reduce consumption of energy and other scarce resources
  • digital currencies to enable a negative interest rate so debt can continue to grow
  • digital currencies to enable fair and effective rationing of scarce resources like food and energy
  • digital currencies to prevent panics from destroying the financial system

I argued that the real purpose of our otherwise irrational and obsessive focus on vaccines as a response to covid was to prepare the behaviors and infrastructure necessary for lockdown policies and digital currencies.

While I still think this hypothesis is plausible and probable there is a fact that bothers me because it is inconsistent with the assumption that our leaders are not evil or stupid.

That is the recent push to vaccinate children. This policy makes no sense in the context of the above hypothesis because:

  • vaccinating children for covid is 100% risk and 0% benefit
  • any sane, non-evil person knows that protecting children from harm should be a top priority
  • young children do not need to participate in the economy with digital currencies
  • children can be vaccinated at a later and safer age when they need to participate in the economy

I do not understand what’s going here. I suppose you could argue that our leaders really are evil and/or stupid, although that seems improbable given the large number of cooperating leaders.

Another possible explanation is that my hypothesis that covid is cover for collapse preparation is incorrect.

What other purpose might there be for our insane covid policies?

Just for fun, let’s go all dark and crazy and speculate the mRNA has some function that has not yet been deployed, and our leaders want it to be injected in everyone before pushing the on button.

Perhaps our leaders have employed, or stolen the ideas from, Jack Alpert to mastermind a humane population reduction plan.

I say humane, by which I mean no suffering or violence, because we’re still assuming here that our leaders are not evil.

Alpert has developed the only feasible plan in existence for retaining a modern technologically advanced civilization after we have depleted most of the economically recoverable fossil energy. His idea is to rapidly reduce our population to about fifty million people concentrated in 3 regions of world with adequate hydro electricity and other necessary natural resources. By keeping the population low and constant, but still large enough to sustain advanced technology and manufacturing, and by aggressively recycling materials and forgoing impossibly wasteful luxuries like air travel and personal vehicles, it might be possible to sustain our science and technologies long enough to make fusion work, before the hydro dams inevitably silt in.

Because of the rapid rate that fossil energy is depleting, and the total dependence of our food supply on that energy, there is insufficient time for a one-child policy and/or family planning education to get the population down to a sustainable level without massive suffering.

A very aggressive plan for reducing the population is required to avoid unimaginable suffering and probable civilization ending nuclear resource wars.

Jack’s idea is to vaccinate everyone on the planet with a genetically engineered substance that causes sterility and that can be reversed with an antidote.

Any couple desiring a child must apply for a birth permit. Once a year a carefully calculated number of permits will be randomly awarded to applicants and those lucky people will be relocated to one of the 3 regions established for humanity’s permanent civilizations and issued the sterility antidote.

If our leaders are indeed implementing Alpert’s plan with a time delayed sterility inducing vaccine, this would explain why children are being targeted for vaccination. It would be imperative that as many child bearing, and soon to be child bearing, people be vaccinated as quickly as possible because once word of the plan gets out, either via a leak or via impossible to ignore evidence, then no further vaccinations will be possible.

If true, this thankfully means our leaders are brilliant heroes rather than evil idiots.

And it gives “The Great Reset” a whole new meaning!

Go Jack go!!!

P.S. I would like to make the above list of covid things that don’t make sense as complete as possible. If I missed anything, please let me know and I will add it.

17-Jul-2022 Addendum

I’m worried that a future visitor who does not know me will will read this post and conclude that I’m a wack job and therefore should discount everything else I’ve written. This is a statement to clarify what I actually believe is going on with covid.

If we assume that our leaders are not evil and/or stupid then there is overwhelming evidence to suggest there’s an agenda other than public health in play for covid policies.

I believe that some of our most senior leaders with the power to influence lower level leaders are using covid as an excuse to implement tools that will be helpful for maintaining social order during an economic collapse.

I do not know if these senior leaders deliberately released an engineered virus, or if they are just taking advantage of a mistake made at the Wuhan lab.

All of the evidence I see supports this “covid is cover for collapse prep” theory, EXCEPT the push to vaccinate children which I cannot explain if we continue to assume our leaders are not evil and/or stupid.

I proposed above, tongue in cheek, that perhaps the child vaccination push could be explained by a humane population reduction agenda, which I think would be a brilliant thing for our leaders to do, because population reduction is the only path to reducing the suffering that is coming due to human overshoot.

The problem with this population reduction hypothesis is that I don’t think are leaders are aware or smart or brave enough to try it.

So to be clear, I do NOT think there is a population reduction agenda in play.

Which means our leaders must be evil and/or stupid.

I’m pretty sure Fauci and his gang are corrupt, but I do not think all the collaborating leaders in the world are evil.

Which leaves stupidity as the only viable explanation for what’s going on with children.

Stupid behavior can have causes other than a low IQ.

Stupid behavior can result from our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, like for example, doubling down because “I can’t possibly have supported the biggest blunder in human history”, or from a mass formation al la Mattias Desmet that causes temporary insanity.

July 13, 2022 Addition

Thank you to a reader for bringing to my attention a list of bad covid decisions compiled by Dr. Vinay Prasad.

I respect Dr. Prasad’s fairness and integrity by only listing those items for which a functioning brain looking at evidence available at the time would know was wrong.

https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/a-checklist-for-covid-policy

“Lots of people commented about COVID-19. Some were more right than others. It isn’t fair to judge people by facts not known at the time. Instead here is a list of issues where a person who read actively, and whose brain was working (aka not riddled with anxiety) could be right in the moment.

  1. The evidence for community cloth masking was awful, nonexistent, negative and poor and we should have run cluster RCTs. This view was obvious based on reading pre-pandemic literature and is why the CDC, WHO and Tony Fauci himself initially advised against masking. Instead, in the weeks that followed many lied about the evidence of cloth masking to push this intervention. It was propaganda, not science. It was shameful how real scientists lied and exaggerated and virtue signalled, all of which prevented randomized trials.
  2. Without embellishment, I will think it’s ok to have supported cloth masking initially, but smart people understood the residual uncertainty and wanted cluster RCTs. Unfortunately, they were defeated by zealots, and we have zero cluster RCTs in high income countries. Aka we learned nothing. This is embarrassing.
  3. Masking kids 2-4 and mandates (oh, of course, except when they nap for 2 hours in the same room!) was a stupid policy and it’s hard to understand how anyone whose brain was working would support it. They napped together in the same room unmasked! Use your brain! How could that possibly work? Moreover, the World Health Organization advised against doing it.
  4. School closure in the spring of 2020 was arguable, but closure any time after Aug 2020 was clearly wrong. Enough data had accumulated by then to know it was a fools errand. Most Western European nations had returned in person by then. Liberal American cities remained the last hold outs. They paid lip service to vulnerable children, but their policies crushed their future.
  5. Vaccinating 20 year old health care workers and teachers and ‘first responders’ before the elderly was clearly stupid. It only happened because anxious first responders are more powerful lobbying force than old people. Society, particularly America, does not value the elderly. Anyone who could do basic arithmetic would know this would cost lives. Even assuming first responders were much more likely to get the virus, the IFR by age was so steep, it could not be overcome by exposure. Wise nations didn’t do it. You only needed a calculator and 2 seconds to realize how stupid it was.
  6. When J&J was found to cause VITT, it was obvious the product should be pulled from the market. Bad policy makers analogized it to DVT after oral contraceptives. They apparently did not understand the difference between the cerebral sinus, and the leg. Or a simple clot and runaway platelet activation. Alternatives were available. The FDA and CDC kept the product for one more year and many people were harmed.
  7. Mandating the mRNA shot was always a stupid idea. First, remember mandating a medical intervention is not done to protect the person getting the intervention. We don’t mandate you take your blood pressure pills. And you’re allowed to decline life-saving therapies. Mandates only exist when there is sufficient benefit to third parties that the intrusion on autonomy is justified. It has to clear a high bar. In the beginning, it looked like the vaccine provided massive individual level protection. Thus, it didn’t matter if someone else didn’t get the shot, you were protected. Modeling studies suggested that thousands of people would have to be excluded to avert one acquisition of COVID. It was clear that many people would be angered, a few would not comply, and there was no justifiable case that coercive vaccination benefited third parties. If a third party was worried, they could get vaccinated themselves. Later, by the fall of 2021, when it was abundantly clear that vaccines were unable to halt novel variants and breakthrough was inevitable, then vaccine mandates were unethical because vaccines could not protect a third party from transmission anyway. Ironically, vaccine mandates were always unethical because they never conferred sufficient benefit to 3rd parties. Instead, some people argued that protecting someone from their own choice was a valuable use of coercion. These people are ignorant of medical history, and do not see the fact that there is no end to this principle. You can mandate people to get any medical intervention by this logic. Moreover, they are aloof from Americans. Americans would never tolerate such an intrusion.
  8. Wearing a mask after vaccination. Or distancing. Or avoiding weddings or avoiding other things. After vaccination, there was nothing more you could do to lower your individual risk. Weight loss, optimizing medical issues, and vaccination by the only three risk reducing interventions. Before it was evident that breakthrough was inevitable, there’s no point to take precautions after vaccination because you were very well protected. The moment it was evident that breakthrough was inevitable, there was no point to take precautions after vaccination because if you live long enough, you’ll eventually get the virus. So what’s the goal of delaying?
  9. Testing testing, testing. The United States not for 1 minute was able to control the virus through test, trace, isolate. The seed load or initial preconditions in 2020 made it impossible to do that. The idea we could test our way halting the virus and his tracks was delusional. Someday Congress should pass a bill asking testing companies to release the names of doctors and epidemiologists who they paid. Once you see the money trail, you will understand why people pushed testing.
  10. After adult vaccination, the idea that wide scale testing was necessary or desirable was a delusion. Testing kids and quarantining them was massively disruptive. The loss of educational alone offset any potential gains. And the final outcome will be inevitable. 93 to 98% breakthrough.
  11. The idea kids need a vaccine to return to normal– was insane. This was absolutely a crazy point of view. Proof that it was not true is that many nations had very high sero prevalence prior to the debut of vaccines. The United Kingdom was nearly 100%. The US was at least over 70% but probably much higher, due to terrible data collection. If kids got COVID anyway prior to vaccine all the restrictions hurt them with no possibility of benefit.
  12. Children never faced an emergency. The regulatory use of emergency use authorization for kids was unjustified. Their drug products should have come through traditional marketing pathways. The IFR in children was too low to constitute an emergency. Moreover, by the time kids vaccines arrived it was clear that breakthrough was inevitable. Ergo vaccinating kids would not protect anyone else. The abuse of expedited pathways benefits companies, but does not benefit people. This abuse has continued in cancer drugs for years. COVID makes people scared, which pharmaceutical companies use to enrich themselves with scant data.
  13. Giving paxlovid to young vaccinated people. Anyone who knows the history of medicine knows that extrapolating data from very sick individuals to milder versions of disease is never a good idea. It’s always better to run a randomized trial before you spend $5 billion dollars treating your anxiety.
  14. Anyone who ever said the word zero COVID is an idiot. Because the opportunity for zero COVID ended in early December 2019, and firmly closed by March of 2020. Anyone who still thought it possible, particularly in 2021, should be muted and ignored.
  15. By June 2022, anybody who thinks the United States should do anything to control infections is wrong. Such a person must be living under a rock to not notice the fact that 200 million plus Americans have returned to complete normal. Moreover, it is not biologically possible. These should be too good reasons for these people to stop.
  16. Travel bans. Border closure. Testing to cross borders. It was evident that these measures could do nothing to stop spread. It’s unbelievable we repeated that until 2022.
  17. Long COVID: If you were very ill with COVID-19, if you were hospitalized, if you were intubated, if you were on death’s door, it is entirely possible that you will have a prolonged recovery. You may never be the same. This has always been the case with respiratory viruses. Or any illness for that matter. But if you had a mild infection, if you didn’t even know you were sick, then it would be astonishing that you would have serious long-term sequela. The burden of proof that this is due to COVID should be very high. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t take you seriously. Doctor should always take patients seriously. And if a person feels bad, we should run studies to determine what makes them better. But that’s very different than advising people that asymptomatic Long Covid is a big problem, and that we should try to control infections in perpetuity. Those are bold policy maneuvers. It requires extraordinary evidence. That evidence has never been met. The best study from the Annals of internal medicine compares patients with milder Covid to those without milder Covid and finds no differences in any of dozens of dozens of biological tests. That finding is astonishing. And should be replicated in larger sample size. But if it holds true, a serious rethinking of long COVID is needed.
  18. Saying in 2022 we need to control infections to prevent mutations. Serious science writers are saying this. In top magazines. It’s totally delusional. There is no political buy-in. Even if there were, you’d have to weld door shut like Shanghai to achieve it. That’s not possible in free society. It’s living in a fairy tale confusing it for reality.
  19. Saying healthcare workers will mask forever. Before you institute a sweeping change in healthcare, don’t you want to run a randomized trial to know it works? Evidence-based medicine is dead when people propose such changes without evidence. I’m pretty confident now that many people didn’t understand it.
  20. And the biggest way to know somebody doesn’t know what they’re talking about: when somebody suggests school reopening benefits rich and privileged kids. It benefits poor, underserved, minority kids. How clueless are you?
  21. I forgot to mention boosting 12-year-olds, yearly booster, and a load of other things. That’s for another column.

These were issues that were not just obvious in retrospect but at the time. A simple test for who knows what they’re talking about.”

What are our leaders doing?

What force is powerful enough to synchronize every leader in almost every country to do the wrong thing on almost every covid action without assuming every leader is evil and/or stupid?

Why has no one figured out what’s going on, including normally intelligent alt-media?

Let’s assume that most of our leaders are normal people, of average intelligence, with good intentions, and they care about the future of their children.

By normal I mean they are decent people with flaws, just like you and I.

By average intelligence I mean they probably have some high school level science, have read a few popular books, and maybe watched a few documentaries, but are not well grounded in the laws of physics, and their mathematics skills are modest at best. Like most people, they do not have a good understanding of energy and its relationship with everything, nor do they have a good grasp of what is technically feasible.

By good intentions I mean they want to do a good job for the people that elected them, while of course making a living, and perhaps providing some extras for their family if a benign opportunity arises, just as you or I would.

By caring about their children I mean they are genuinely worried about:

  • The threat of an economic crash caused by unsustainable debt and its associated everything bubble that is now flashing red and impossible to ignore.
  • The reality and threat of climate change that is now obvious to anyone that has been alive for more than a few decades.
  • Limits to growth. Our leader’s understanding of energy depletion is probably a mixed bag, as it is with our next door neighbors. Most leaders probably understand that fossil energy growth is no longer desirable, some may understand that fossil energy growth is no longer possible, most probably still hope the green energy story is true but are getting worried it may be false, and a tiny minority may understand the reality of peak oil and its implications.

Overlaying all of the above, our leaders, like most humans, have a genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, which manifests as an optimism bias, and an inability to grasp the reality and implications of human overshoot. We can be fairly certain that none of our leaders have defective denial genes, which would permit them to see overshoot, because that would have prevented them from winning their election.

Given these assumptions about our leaders, which are probably true, what would we expect them to do?

Let’s start with what they’ve done to date:

  • Increased the debt and lowered the interest rate to buy time for someone to think of something.
  • Signed free trade agreements to squeeze more efficiency out of the global economy.
  • Subsidized surplus corn to stretch gasoline with ethanol.
  • Subsidized green energy and electric cars in the hope it would reduce fossil energy use. They don’t understand why, but they can see this strategy is not helping.
  • Invested a lot of money into nuclear fusion returning zero prospects of success.
  • Agreed with good intentions to many climate change protocols and subsequently learned it is impossible to fulfill those agreements without damaging the economy.
  • Continued heavy military spending, just in case.

I expect our leaders now understand that:

  • We are between a rock and a hard place. They don’t fully understand why we have reached limits to growth, nor can they due to their normal denial genes, but they do understand something must change soon.
  • Debt is a bomb waiting to explode. They can see the end of the runway with rising inflation.
  • Climate change is a really nasty problem. Consumption must go down, but that will crash the economy. Even with CO2 reductions, it’s too late to avoid refugees and starvation.
  • Avoiding damaging social unrest, and mitigating/reducing the coming suffering will require sacrifice and sharing between countries, which will require some form of global cooperation with tight control over citizens.

Those of us that have paid attention and not listened to the official narrative know that nothing about covid makes sense. To be blunt, almost every action and policy has been wrong, in almost every country, and all of our leaders are synchronized, including their political opposition, almost without exception. How can this be? It’s simply not possible that all of our leaders are evil and/or stupid.

What force is powerful enough to have caused a diverse group of big ego leaders from many countries to cooperate on a secret plan that no one discusses? What force is powerful enough to have caused them to do things that under normal circumstances would have been blocked by their good ethics and character?

We know the various central banks have been working as a team since at least the 2008 GFC to keep the global wheels on. Recall that in the 2008 aftermath it was disclosed that we were hours away from a collapse of the banking system had the US congress not approved the bailout. The stresses and pressures in the system today are MUCH higher than they were in 2008 because we fixed a too much debt problem by adding a lot more debt.

In 2019 something in the global plumbing was beginning to break and it came to a head in September with a crisis in the repo market. The central banks together decided what needed to be done and the head of each central bank sat down with the leader of their country and spelled out the reality that an imminent “recession”, if not averted, would likely take out modern civilization due to the global debt bubble and lack of growth.

I imagine they said something like, “we need an excuse to print a gazillion dollars, and we’re going to need a digital currency soon that restricts many freedoms, and we might fail so you should think about a plan B for controlling social unrest. We think a not so serious global pandemic exaggerated into a panic is the perfect cover to accomplish all of this.”

No other force is powerful enough to explain the behavior we observe. It explains everything, including why no one talks about it, because if they did it would cause panic in the markets, which would harm themselves and their children. This also thankfully means we can continue to assume that most (not all) of our leaders are decent people like you and I.

The covid pandemic provided:

  • A reason for everyone from all political persuasions to support printing and handing out trillions of dollars to avoid a “recession”.
  • A means via lockdowns of reducing energy and materials consumption, and restricting freedom of movement and assembly, that can be invoked as needed without causing the panic that disclosing the end of growth would cause.
  • A reason for creating the infrastructure and social behaviors necessary for a digital currency via vaccine passports. A digital currency will be very helpful for implementing negative interest rates needed to avoid a Minsky Moment, and for rationing food and energy, and for preventing bank runs. The path they chose was to require all citizens to be injected with a substance and to carry proof via a vaccine passport. I expect they hoped the injected substance would be harmless with some tangible benefit but it appears their hopes have been dashed by Murphy’s Law and inadequate time for testing.
  • Most powerful countries agreed to this plan. The US, EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia are all on board. As is China who engineered the virus with funding from the US, and which influenced the WHO to ensure global spread of the virus in the early days.
  • Russia refused to join the plan, perhaps after calculating that with its healthy ratio of natural resources to population, modest debt, food self-sufficiency, and citizens capable of enduring some hardship, they will be better off charting an independent path.
  • The collaborating leaders viscerally hate Putin for not being a team player and are attempting to cause a regime change in Russia by provoking Russia into an expensive war and by applying economic sanctions. As with covid, it seems this plan is failing so we should expect a Plan B soon.
  • A new repo crisis began in 2022 and so Monkeypox was introduced just in case another pandemic is required to get the financial system under control.

Finally, we can now answer another burning question:

  • Why has no one figured out what’s going on, including normally intelligent alt-media?
  • Because to understand requires acceptance of the end of growth and overshoot, and that’s not possible for most people due to our species’ tendency to deny unpleasant realities as explained by Varki’s MORT theory.
  • For those that don’t believe the official covid narrative, it’s ok to blame corrupt pharma, or a scheming WEF, but it’s not ok to blame overshoot.

Let’s hope Plan B does not involve nuclear weapons but does have something to do with humane population reduction.

Take us to DEFCON 1

The US military defines its Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) levels as follows:

  • DEFCON 5 is normal readiness.
  • DEFCON 4 is above normal readiness.
  • DEFCON 3 is the air force ready to mobilize in 15 minutes.
  • DEFCON 2 is all forces ready to fight in 6 hours.
  • DEFCON 1 is the maximum state of readiness and means nuclear war is imminent or has already started.

I have my own definitions that I use for my personal life.

I spent the first 50 years of my life at DEFCON level 5. That would be as a normal, fully in denial, culturally conforming, dopamine & status seeking, energy maximizing, member of a superorganism.

Then I had a stress related meltdown and while recovering stumbled on peak oil. After seeking and failing to find a good path forward other than population reduction, I wondered what else I was in denial about, and widened my field of view to include climate change, pollution, species extinction, unsustainable debt, etc., all of which I eventually came to understand are related and fall under the umbrella of human overshoot.

Now at DEFCON level 4, a realty based state of awareness, I began to think about making changes to my life, took a 6 month course on small scale farming, and did some volunteer work on a small organic farm.

Then the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) occurred and I went to DEFCON level 3.

Confident that a collapse would occur within 10 years, I changed everything in my life. A new location where I’d be happy finishing my life, a simpler slower lifestyle, satisfying physical work, improved health, and thank goodness, Varki’s MORT theory to keep me sane with an explanation for the insanity all around me.

I also began to methodically plan and implement some preparations for a different world that I expected would arrive soon. The basic idea was to convert some retirement savings into things needed to survive and/or that might provide some joy in a harsher simpler world, and that won’t go bad, will never be cheaper, or better quality, or more available than today.

In hindsight I didn’t have a powerful enough imagination to predict that our leaders would loan into existence many trillions of dollars that can never possibly be repaid, to avoid having to acknowledge overshoot, and to extend and pretend business as usual a few extra years, at the expense of making our destination worse, but they did.

Then early in 2020 I saw the Chinese panicking over a virus before anyone here was discussing it, and I went to DEFCON level 2.

Now I got serious about completing most of my preps, which was an easy low stress exercise, because I already had a plan and simply had to execute it.

By the time the majority was scrambling, I was done, and completely calm and confident.

Today, two years into the pandemic, I’m seeing threats that have caused me to go to DEFCON level 1:

  • Many supply chains are broken and are getting worse, not better. This is a strong signal that our complex civilization is simplifying in unpredictable ways, as predicted by David Korowicz.
  • Energy shortages have emerged simultaneously in multiple strategically important regions. This is a big deal because fossil energy underpins everything our species depends on to survive. Net energy peaked a few years ago and we have been on a plateau made wider by unprecedented money printing, but once we fall over the edge I believe the decline will be much faster than the few percent per year that an unstressed geology and monetary system would deliver. I do not know if we’ve already fallen off the plateau, but I do know it will happen soon, and when it does, the changes will be profound, rapid, and painful. Regardless if the current energy problems prove to be temporary, they are a serious threat to an already fragile economy, civil society, and war-free world.
  • The Chinese economy is showing signs of stress from excess debt similar to the west’s 2008 GFC. Our vulnerability to a sick China is much greater than most assume because everything we depend on is dependent on Asian manufacturing, and a functioning global shipping system, and a functioning global banking system. This time I doubt more debt will fix an excess debt problem.
  • There are worrying signals that our vaccination policy is failing with health risks for both vaccinated and unvaccinated increasing, and that the boosters everyone is counting on may not work.
  • The leaders of the majority of countries seem incapable of absorbing and integrating evidence to improve their Covid strategy. If they are incapable of effectively managing Covid, we can be confident they will not be capable of managing the much more complex and profound implications of declining energy and the economic contraction it will cause.
  • All paths lead to food and we are 3 missed meals away from civil disorder. The climate seems to have shifted a gear this year and I expect this will negatively impact agricultural yields soon. Energy shortages will also negatively impact food production and distribution. As will supply chain problems. As will more Covid problems. As will a global economic depression.

DEFCON level 1 does not mean I’m expecting the end of the world, but it does mean I intend to complete everything I can think of to prepare for what I think is coming, on the assumption that we are near the end zone, and that by the time our arrival is confirmed, it will probably be too late to do anything.

There’s nothing wrong with being prepared a little early. Especially when being late means it may be impossible to prepare.

Chris Martenson is thinking along the same lines and recently produced an excellent video explaining what’s happening around the world with energy.

How to Have a Difficult Conversation about Vaccination

I’ve decided to wait a little longer before being vaccinated, so that I can observe and weigh rapidly accumulating evidence for and against vaccination.

I’m feeling social pressure to get vaccinated, and I expect that pressure to increase, so I’ve been thinking about how to discuss this divisive topic with people that I care about. My plan follows.

I will start by acknowledging that we share common goals:

  • prevent serious sickness and death
  • resume normal activities as soon as possible
  • do what is best for the majority of citizens

Then I will carefully articulate that I understand what the other person believes:

  • vaccination prevents serious sickness and death
  • vaccination reduces spread of the virus
  • vaccination discourages the emergence of new more dangerous variants
  • vaccination protects against variants, and if protection fails in the future for a new variant, can be remedied with a new booster vaccine
  • therefore, a person who does not get vaccinated is being irresponsible by increasing the risk to both vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens

Then I will confirm that I understand why they have these beliefs:

  • health authorities and political leaders in almost all countries of the world are communicating that these beliefs are true
  • all of the mainstream news media supports these views
  • there is an aggressive worldwide campaign underway to vaccinate most citizens
  • countries with the highest vaccination rates have to date shown the most improvement in cases and sickness

Then I will identify the source of my concern that our vaccination policy may be a mistake:

  • Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is a vaccine expert with 30 years experience developing vaccines https://www.linkedin.com/in/geertvandenbossche/
  • Bossche is not an anti-vax conspiracist
  • Bossche thinks our leaders and vaccine developers are competent with good intentions but may have overlooked some serious implications of their strategy due to the urgency to “do something”, and due to a lack of understanding of how some aspects of the immune system function
  • Bossche thinks our current broad vaccination policy would be the correct policy if deployed before the virus was widespread in the population

Then I will explain why I think we should pay attention to Bossche:

  • he is intelligent with good intentions
  • his arguments are science based and plausible
  • he is not saying that his hypothesis is absolutely correct, he is saying there is enough existing science and emerging evidence to warrant an urgent investigation and discussion by the scientific community
  • caution is wise because we are intervening in an unprecedented manner (vaccinating during a pandemic with emerging variants) on a complex system (immune system), within a complex system (human body), within a complex system (global civilization), using a tool with long-lasting irreversible effects (vaccination), and the penalty for making a mistake is high (much worse pandemic)
  • our leaders have not earned our trust because to date they have a poor track record of making timely and wise decisions on the virus
  • if Bossche is correct and we’ve made a mistake then our current vaccination policy has serious long term implications that may not be undone

Then I will provide a link to Bossche’s site and point to an April 22 interview of Bossche by Bret Weinstein, a PhD biologist, who helps Bossche explain a complex topic, and which is the best starting point for understanding the risks.

Click to access geert-vanden-bossche-faq-23-may-2021.pdf

Then I will explain the implications of Bossche being correct:

  • vaccination prevents serious sickness and death from the original virus
  • vaccination reduces spread of the original virus
  • vaccination encourages the emergence of new more dangerous variants
  • vaccination will not protect against new variants, and may block the effectiveness of new booster vaccines for new variants
  • vaccination will reduce the innate immune system’s ability to respond to new variants
  • therefore, a healthy person at low risk of serious sickness who chooses to be vaccinated will increase the risk to vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens, and to themselves
  • by waiting for a review of the science and for data on emerging variants, before being vaccinated, low risk citizens may be doing the right thing for both themselves and society

Then I will explain that my decision to wait would be wrong if:

  • I was unhealthy or my immune system was weak
  • I had regular close contact with people that are unhealthy or have weak immune systems
  • I was not using high caution with social distancing, masks, and personal hygiene

Denial with Cortical Columns

I just finished the new book by Jeff Hawkins titled “A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence”.

A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI. 

For all of neuroscience’s advances, we’ve made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? 

Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world-not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought. 

A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the understanding of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word.

I’ve followed Hawkins for many years and he’s one of my favorite neuroscience researchers. He started as an electrical engineer and created in 1996 the groundbreaking handheld PalmPilot (which I owned 🙂 ), and then switched careers to his passion of figuring out how the brain works.

In his book he proposes a new theoretical framework for how intelligence works. I think he’s on to something important. So does Richard Dawkins who wrote the forward and compares the book to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

I see an opportunity to build on Hawkins’ intelligence framework to push Varki’s MORT theory forward by refining why and what we deny, and how denial is implemented in the brain. Some of my still rough ideas are presented at the end of this essay.

There’s a second aspect of Hawkins’ book that is also interesting.

After presenting his new theory on intelligence, Hawkins spends the last half of the book explaining how our old brain behaviors and false beliefs (aka denial) threaten the survival of our species, and he proposes several ways we might avoid these threats.

He’s clearly worried and knows we are in trouble.

Yet when discussing the threats to our species he is blind to the biggest, imminent, and certain threat we face: fossil energy depletion. Hawkins, like most polymaths, can’t see that the technology he loves, was created by, and totally depends on, rapidly depleting non-renewable resources.

So we have a world expert on how and why our brain creates false beliefs, that can’t see his own false beliefs.

We could ask for no better evidence that MORT is true! 

But wait, there’s more.

In the last chapters Hawkins obsesses over inventing a lasting means for our species to signal to other life in the universe that human intelligence once existed. As I was reading this I kept thinking, what the hell are you going on about? The odds are extremely low that other intelligent life will ever see our signaling satellites, and who the hell cares if they do? Then a light went on. His signal is a high tech version of an Egyptian pyramid, and is his brain’s mechanism for denying death.

So how could it get any better?

  • a well written enjoyable book
  • with an important new theory
  • on the most interesting aspect of a unique species
  • that may push forward Varki’s MORT theory on why we exist
  • by a brilliant polymath
  • that is blinded by the same denial that created his species

Following is a brief recapitulation of Hawkins’ cortical column framework for intelligence integrated with my musings on how it might be used to clarify and focus Varki’s MORT theory.

This hypothesis will be revised, possibly substantially, after I complete a 2nd more careful reading of Hawkins’ book and published papers, which I’ve just started. I’m also hoping to incorporate criticism from Dr. Varki which may improve or kill my ideas.

Downvoting the Cortical Column Death Model to Breach the Extended Theory of Mind Barrier

Version 1.2, April 17, 2021

Note: For the sake of brevity, every occurrence of “not die” should be read as “not die until viable offspring are produced”.

  • Genes evolve and collaborate to create bodies.
  • Bodies exist to replicate genes.
  • A body must not die to achieve its purpose of replicating genes.
  • The brain exists to help the body by choosing the best action to not die for a given set of sensory inputs.
  • The old brain uses simple static models to directly cause actions to not die.
  • The neocortex uses more complex learned models to indirectly cause actions to not die by requesting the old brain to execute actions.
  • Learning is moving: the neocortex learns by moving senses around the subject to create (up to about 1000) reference frame models.
  • Thinking is moving: concepts without physical form, like mathematics, are learned by moving between models to create new reference frame models.
  • Models have redundancy which makes knowledge more resilient and repurposable.
  • Models are stored in cortical columns.
  • The neocortex is composed of many nearly identical cortical columns.
  • Senses (and outputs from other models) are evaluated for matches by models.
  • Models collaborate by voting to decide our conscious reality.
  • The agreed reality is used by other models to select the best action to not die.
  • Evolution increases the number of cortical columns in species that benefit from more intelligence to not die.
  • Social species have the most cortical columns because modeling social relationships is hard.
  • The human neocortex has about 150,000 cortical columns.
  • There are two important thresholds on the continuum of increasing social intelligence.
  • “Theory of mind” is the threshold where a brain learns a model of another brain, and that model includes an understanding that the other brain can die.
  • “Extended theory of mind” is the threshold where a brain learns that its model of another brain also models itself, and that it can also die.
  • The extended theory of mind threshold may be difficult for evolution to cross, because it has happened only once on this planet.
  • A model that predicts possible death from injury and certain death from old age results in fewer actions to not die.
  • Fewer actions to not die is called depression.
  • Genes for an extended theory of mind thus do not persist.
  • To break through the barrier, evolution requires a mechanism to prevent the learned death model from evaluating true.
  • A mechanism consistent with the archeological record was to learn a model for life after death (aka God) which downvotes the death model thus continuing the actions to not die.

Modern Implications of the Death Model

  • Climate change acceptance combined with the common false belief that renewable energy can replace depleting non-renewable fossil energy, and the common false belief that technology can remove sufficient CO2 from the atmosphere, does not trigger the death model, and the false beliefs cause our species to take actions that worsen our overshoot predicament.
  • Awareness of human overshoot and its implications are present in less than 0.01% of humans, including most highly educated polymaths, because it triggers the death model. Most people deny overshoot with false beliefs that non-renewable resources are abundant.

Is Covid-19 providing cover for Jay Hanson’s Society of Sloth?

Gail Tverberg made a comment today that rings true and motivated me to write about something I’ve been mulling for a while…

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/12/23/2020-the-year-things-started-going-badly-wrong/comment-page-24/#comment-274042

I think the reaction to COVID-19 is part of how a self-organizing system works. People were looking for a reason to cut back/shut down. The illness provided this.

I do not believe in most conspiracy theories, but I do believe that crises are frequently used to implement plans that would be impossible without a crisis. The responses to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, and the 2008 GFC are good modern examples.

Perhaps the virus has provided (mostly subconscious) cover for:

  • citizens tired of commuting 2 hours a day to a stressful job so they could keep up with their neighbor’s latest unnecessary status symbol purchase
  • citizens who intuited they should reduce discretionary spending and pay down credit card debt, which interestingly declined in 2020, rather than increasing as it did during the 2008 GFC
  • leaders that sensed we should voluntarily throttle back, because we’d soon be forced by limits to growth
  • leaders that understood we needed to rapidly reduce CO2 emissions, and the only way to achieve this is by contracting the economy
  • leaders that needed an excuse to restrict freedoms to maintain civil order in preparation for a significant contraction of our energy/economic system
  • central banks that understood we had hit limits to growth and that needed an excuse for massive corporate bailouts to prevent a catastrophic economic collapse, and for MMT to keep citizens fed

Perhaps this helps to explain why our responses to the virus have not been intelligent or optimal:

  • effective means of containing the spread were ignored or procrastinated in the crucial early days
  • existing cheap and effective preventative measures are ignored and not promoted; new preventative measures are not researched
  • promising cheap and effective treatments are ignored and/or aggressively undermined
  • some lock-down measures lack logic or good judgement
  • the source of the virus is not being aggressively investigated to better understand appropriate responses, and to prevent a reoccurrence

To be clear, I am not suggesting a conspiracy to release a virus. I think the most probable explanation is that the virus was engineered in a lab with good intentions, and that it escaped by accident, as explained here:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

I am suggesting that people at all levels of our society appear to be using the virus as an excuse to make changes that were impossible to make prior to the crisis. Some of these plans may have been well thought out and sitting on a shelf waiting for the right circumstances, like for example MMT, and other responses, like for example citizens paying down credit card debt, may be an instinctual response to anticipated scarcity.

Jay Hanson, who died in 2018, was one of the greatest thinkers about human overshoot. I wrote more about Hanson here:

https://un-denial.com/2018/03/26/by-jay-hanson-reality-report-interview-november-3-2008/

Hanson concluded that civilization was doomed due to genetic human behaviors that were unlikely to change, and that it would probably end with a nuclear war, as discussed in this 2008 interview with Jason Bradford:

right click save as to download

Hanson did however describe one path that was thermodynamically feasible, and that might avoid some of the worst suffering.

Perhaps we have (mostly subconsciously) decided to implement some of Jay Hanson’s ideas.

https://dieoff.com/page168.htm

<begin extract from Hanson’s essay>

SOCIETY OF SLOTH

In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimises civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.
— Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1762

(What follows is not meant to be a comprehensive description of a new society, but only presents some conceptual ideas for consideration.)

MY KEY DEFINITIONS

  • GLOBAL PROBLEMATIC (after The Club of Rome, 1972): Global tragedy of the commons because people are genetically programmed to more-than-reproduce themselves and make the best use of their environments.
  • COMMONS: “A commons is any resource treated as though it belongs to all. When anyone can claim a resource simply on the grounds that he wants or needs to use it, one has a commons.” [32]
  • NEEDS: Human “needs” have a scientific basis which is defined by human biology. 35,000 years ago, three million hunter-gatherers “needed” community, shelter, health care, clean water, clean air, and about 3,000 calories a day of nutritious food. Today, people still “need” the same things that hunter-gatherers “needed” then (except fewer calories).
  • eMergy: [33] eMergy (with an “M”) is the solar energy used directly and indirectly to make a service or product. In other words, eMergy is the “cost” of a service or a product in units of solar energy.
        Why eMergy? In reality, the economy is nothing but a monstrous, energy-gulping Rube Goldberg machine to deliver “needs” to people. But each of those three million hunter-gatherers was the energy-using counterpart of a common dolphin, whereas each of today’s 280 million Americans matches the energy use of a sperm whale. Obviously, the “economy” is incredibly inefficient at delivering “needs” to people.
        No doubt my statement will stick in the economist’s craw, because after all, isn’t “efficiency” what economics is all about? The problem with “economic efficiency” is that “money” is not a measure of anything in the real world (like, say, BTUs). Money is power because money “empowers” people to buy and do the things they want — including buying and doing other people (politics). Thus, “economic efficiency” is properly seen as a “political” concept that was designed to preserve political power for those who have it.
        For over a century, theorists have sought ways of integrating economics and environmental accounting, often using energy as a common measure. But these efforts met with limited success because different kinds of available energy are not equivalent. The measure of “eMergy” allows us to compare commodities, services and environmental work of different types. “Transformity” – the eMergy per unit energy – allows us to compare different kinds of available of energy.
        So we need to totally junk the present economic system and replace it with a new one that minimizes eMergy costs (not money costs ) and delivers basic needs (not Cadillacs) to everyone in a sustainable way.
  • SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: Sustainable development both improves quality of life and retains continuity with physical conditions; it requires that social systems be equitable and physical systems circular (industrial outputs become industrial inputs).
  • AUTHORITY: Goals (or ideals) are not produced by a consensus of the governed, rather a qualified authority determines goals. For example, physical goals for sustainable development must come from “scientific” authority — because no one else knows what they must be. All contemporary political systems are “authoritarian” with the moneyed class ruling the pseudo democracies.
  • COERCION (politics): To “coerce” is to compel one to act in a certain way — either by promise of reward or threat of punishment. Two obvious examples of coercion are our system of laws and paychecks.
  • THE ONE-AND-ONLY HUMANE SOLUTION: “Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” [34] A global system of coercion — laws, police, punishments and rewards. In principle, the global commons can only be managed at the global level by people who understand the physical systems involved: scientists. Global coercion can be seen in the worldwide reactions to ozone depletion and global warming. Remarkably, even economists find that authoritarian coercion can make them “better off”:

A group of economists had gathered at my house for dinner. While we were waiting for the food in the oven to finish cooking, I brought a large bowl of cashew nuts into the living room where people were having cocktails. In a few minutes, half the bowl of nuts was gone, and I could see that our appetites were in danger. Quickly, I seized the bowl of nuts and put it back in the kitchen (eating a few more nuts along the way, of course). When I returned, my fellow economists generally applauded my quick action, but then we followed our natural inclinations which was to try to analyze the situation to death. The burning question was: how could removing an option possibly have made us better off? After all, if we wanted to stop eating cashews, we could have done that at any time. [35]

Besides laws and paychecks, coercion can take many forms:

It is not necessary to construct a theory of intentional cultural control. In truth, the strength of the control process rests in its apparent absence. The desired systemic result is achieved ordinarily by a loose though effective institutional process. It utilizes the education of journalists and other media professionals, built-in penalties and rewards for doing what is expected, norms presented as objective rules, and the occasional but telling direct intrusion from above. The main lever is the internalization of values. [36]

Step one would be to establish a global government of some sort with the authority to protect the global commons — our life-support system — as well as protecting universal human rights. This government would also oversee the “clean” manufacturing of “repairable” and “reusable” energy-efficient appliances and transportation systems. It would also insure the sustainable production of staples like wheat, rice, oats, and fish.

Does this new global government sound repressive or restrictive? Not at all. A great deal of freedom is possible — in fact, far more than we have now.

eMERGY CERTIFICATES
Step two would be to replace the organizing principle of “avarice” with the principle of “sloth”; break out of the money-market-advertising-consumption death trap. The Society of Sloth would not be based on money because that would be inherently unsustainable. Instead, it would be based on “eMergy Certificates”. [37]

Global government would determine the “needs” of the public, set industrial production accordingly, and calculate the amount of eMergy used to meet these needs. Government would then distribute purchasing power in the form of eMergy certificates, the amount issued to each person being equivalent to his pro rata share of the eMergy cost of the consumer goods and services.

eMergy certificates bear the identification of the person to whom issued and are non-negotiable. They resemble a bank check in that they bear no face denomination, this being entered at the time of spending. They are surrendered upon the purchase of goods or services at any center of distribution and are permanently canceled, becoming entries in a uniform accounting system. Being non-negotiable they cannot be lost, stolen, gambled, or given away because they are invalid in the hands of any person other than the one to whom issued.

Lost eMergy certificates would be easily replaced. Certificates can not be saved because they become void at the termination of the two-year period for which they are issued. They can only be spent.

Insecurity of old age is abolished and both saving and insurance become unnecessary and impossible. eMergy Certificates would put absolute limits on consumption and provide people with a guaranteed stream of “needs” for life.

With modern technology, probably less than 5% of the population could produce all the goods we really “need”. A certain number of “producers” could be drafted and trained by society to produce for two years. The rest can stay home and sleep, sing, dance, paint, read, write, pray, play, do minor repairs, work in the garden, and practice birth control.

SELF-DETERMINATION
Any number of cultural, ethnic or religious communities could be established by popular vote. Religious communities could have public prayer in their schools, prohibit booze, allow no television to corrupt their kids, wear uniforms, whatever. Communities of writers or painters could be established in which bad taste would be against the law. Ethnic communities could be established to preserve language and customs. If someone didn’t like the rules in a particular community, they could move to another religious, cultural, or ethnic community of their choosing.

In short, the one big freedom that individuals would have to give up would be the freedom to destroy the commons (in its broadest sense) — the freedom to kill. And in return, they would be given a guaranteed income for life and the freedom to live almost any way they choose.”

<end extract from Hanson’s essay>