Many facts, insights, causes, outcomes, solutions, and evolved behaviors associated with human overshoot have been discussed by many people over many years.
It’s rare for a new idea to emerge in the overshoot space.
Hideaway’s CACTUS theory has some important fresh insights not previously discussed about the biophysical forces that collaborate to create brief blips of modernity in the universe.
Not every idea in CACTUS is new. But CACTUS identifies and integrates all of the important overshoot forces into a coherent unified theory that explains what’s going on better than anything I’ve seen in 20 years of study.
Inside the integrated whole of CACTUS is an important relationship I’ve not seen previously discussed that explains modernity’s dependence on growth of civilization scale for growth of resource use efficiency, and growth of resource extraction technology complexity, which creates self-reinforcing feedback loops, and vulnerabilities, that accelerate both the growth and decline of modernity.
CACTUS shows that the requirement for growth is independent of the type of economic system, or monetary system, or states thereof.
CACTUS shows that overshoot collapse can be triggered by depletion of any of many non-renewable resources, not just the master resource diesel.
CACTUS shows that steady-state and degrowth “solutions”, or any other form of “sustainable” modernity, are impossible, and therefore surviving humans will return to their hunter gatherer origins.
CACTUS shows that a gentle decline is impossible and that modernity will end rapidly.
CACTUS provides a clear prescription on what needs to be done to extend modernity as long as possible, assuming that is your goal.
CACTUS explains what not to do if the goal is to avoid triggering a premature collapse. Our leaders do not understand (or deny) CACTUS, and therefore they are making decisions that will end modernity sooner than was necessary. Citizens also do not understand (or deny) CACTUS, and therefore they are permitting their leaders to get away with the dumbfuckery.
CACTUS shows that broad awareness of overshoot and CACTUS is a good thing if you want to avoid war and violence as growth slows, and you want to avoid triggering a premature collapse.
CACTUS shows that modernity will be rare and brief when it emerges in the universe, and that modernity will never regrow on this planet, and therefore CACTUS provides deep reasons for gratitude and temperance.
These are BIG important ideas.
Elements of CACTUS have been discussed by others elsewhere, but the integrated totality of CACTUS ideas are not in wide circulation, and given their profound implications, deserve widespread debate and discussion.
Yet, what do we observe?
Silence.
Every famous overshoot intellectual, and the sites that focus on overshoot issues, are silent on CACTUS.
How is this possible? Seriously.
If I had learned about CACTUS from say Gail Tverberg, or Tim Morgan, or Tim Watkins, or Nate Hagens, or Alice Friedemann, or Chris Martenson, or Jack Alpert, or B, or Jean-Marc Jancovici, or Quark, or Simon Michaux, or David Korowicz, or Tom Murphy, or Tim Garrett, or Sam Mitchell, or Bill Rees, or Sid Smith, or Dennis Meadows, or William Catton, or Jay Hanson, or Paul Chefurka, or Richard Heinberg, or Charlie Hall, or Joseph Tainter, or James, or Jason Bradford, or xraymike79, etc., etc., instead of stumbling on Hideaway’s CACTUS theory in posts he made at the Peak Oil Barrel site that others, including the site owner, were ignoring or aggressively denying, I would have still discussed CACTUS hundreds of times, because the idea is so important to understanding our reality.
Why is the little un-Denial community the only site discussing CACTUS?
Ditto on the Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory.
After I stumbled on Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory in a 2013 CBC radio interview, I talked about nothing else for 10 years because it was such an important new idea for making sense of the existence and strange behaviors of a uniquely intelligent species, and for people, like myself, trying to find a path to reducing harms from overshoot.
For anyone trying to bring awareness and positive change to any unpleasant issue, including people still trying to find a solution for overshoot, or any of its symptoms like climate change, pollution, species extinction, ecosystem destruction, etc., etc., MORT is the MOST IMPORTANT IDEA they need to understand.
MORT explains why 99.9% of people aggressively deny everything that is unpleasant, including issues that are obvious without an advanced education, and including when denial of the issue will make things even more unpleasant.
MORT explains why famous polymaths who can and do understand many complex issues, are incapable of understand relatively simple overshoot issues, even when spoon-fed the facts.
MORT explains why only one species has evolved an extended theory of mind, despite obviously powerful fitness advantages.
MORT explains why only one species has gods.
MORT explains why behaviorally modern humans rapidly emerged from one small tribe to extinct all close cousins, and to dominate all other species.
These are BIG important ideas.
And yet all of the overshoot experts, including people who have devoted their lives to finding solutions to overshoot or its symptoms, all of whom have failed due to the genetic denial explained by MORT, have been silent on MORT for over 10 years.
Why, for example, don’t the thousands of climate scientists that have totally failed to make a difference, want to to understand why they failed? Why do climate scientists that have a sound understanding of physics still push “solutions” that are physically impossible?
How is this possible? Seriously.
If the reason everyone is silent on MORT and CACTUS is because they think the theories are wrong, then why hasn’t a single expert explained why they are wrong? Or proposed more compelling theories to explain what we observe?
No discussion. No criticism. No debate. Not even acknowledgement that the MORT and CACTUS theories exist.
Just silence.
I believe most of my overshoot colleagues have good intentions, and good integrity, and good intelligence, and so the only explanation I can think of is that ALL of the overshoot experts have normal denial genes, and un-Denial is the only place on the planet that the tiny number of mutants with defective denial genes congregate.
Is this possible?
It seems very improbable, but what other explanation is there?
Neither Iran, nor the US, nor the mainstream news, nor most of the alternative news, ever mentions conventional oil depletion, or the fact that last year it was officially announced that US fracked oil is peaking, or the empire’s need to sell oil for USD to support its reserve currency.
Instead they blame a tiny country of 10 million with zero resources for controlling a rich country of 300 million, or nuclear weapons that US government security officials testified do not exist, or the need to protect the same citizens they harmed with sanctions and bombs, or 10 other bullshit reasons.
Even insiders with high integrity and intelligence do not speak the truth:
The Islamic Republic will not be intimidated by the Trump regime. It is clear that the orders are coming from the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv and the powerful Zionist lobby in Washington. This is a war of choice for the US but an existential war for Iran.https://t.co/HZOJKtYwRw
We see pundits speculating that US is actually trying to capture business from the gulf states by supplying US oil and LNG to the world, or how the Hormuz closure is good because it will accelerate the energy transition away from oil, or how life will go back to normal the day after Hormuz reopens.
These are not small errors.
The Iran war is the most consequential event since oil was discovered 167 years ago, and will harm every human on the planet, yet almost no one discusses its root cause, or its true implications.
How is this possible? Seriously.
The only person that occasionally admits the true objective is to control Iran’s oil is an elderly person with a failing brain that rants on a social media platform he owns but no one else uses, and most people ignore his rants because he’s a crazy old guy, and they ignore he threatened to genocide a 2500 year old civilization of 90 million people, and they ignore he times his tweets with the market to enable insider trading, and they ignore he thinks he’s Jesus 2.0, and they ignore he has absolute authority over the world’s second largest nuclear weapons arsenal.
How is this possible? Seriously.
Covid, the second most consequential event in decades, followed a similar pattern.
Governments, and healthcare “professionals”, and most intellectuals, and mainstream news, and the majority of citizens, never discussed and denied the obvious bioweapon source of the virus, or the fact that mRNA is a radically new pharma technology with a history of failed trials, or the grossly insufficient testing used to justify the transfection of billions that did not need protection, or the obvious inherent risks associated with mRNA technology, or the data that subsequently proved mRNA did not work and was dangerous.
Not one person has been held to account for the unnecessary deaths of about 20 million people.
How is this possible? Seriously.
Thank you Dr. Ajit Varki for keeping the few of us able to see reality sane with your MORT theory that explains why we are surrounded by 8 billion crazies.
In my last essay I explained there are 4 primary lenses through which to view our overshoot predicament. I argued that the CACTUS lens (Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System) provides the clearest view of what to expect and what we should do.
Unfortunately, what US leaders have decided to do in Iran is the opposite of what CACTUS prescribes, which means we should expect the time to collapse to be shorter now than it was a week ago.
Explanations given by US leaders for why they attacked Iran have been muddled, fluid, and unconvincing. They include:
nuclear weapons need to be obliterated again
conventional missiles threaten nuclear armed Israel
Iran supports people defending their own land (aka terrorists)
protecting protesters harmed by the US attack on Iran’s currency
regime change
pre-empting an attack on US
Counter explanations from justifiably skeptical journalists and analysts are also varied including:
Israel influence on US politics to achieve regional power goals
Epstein distraction
Evangelical Christians believe middle east conflict required for Jesus to return
hatred of Muslims and/or Arabs
revenge for American embassy hostages
Iranian theocratic regime is evil and not supported by most citizens
Each of these explanations no doubt motivates different groups, however none of them are the reason the US attacked Iran.
In this essay I explain the real reason US leaders attacked Iran, why they are lying to us, and why, as CACTUS explains, the US has made things worse for all countries, including themselves.
My explanation does not require US leaders to have extraordinary awareness or intelligence, nor to have rare defective denial genes, and I assume US leaders are mostly good people trying to do the right thing for their citizens, which increases the probability that I am correct.
Risks
The risks US leaders have taken by starting a war with Iran are extraordinarily high. I think they know this. Therefore, their reason for attacking Iran must be existential.
Iran is a much tougher adversary than other countries the US has fought like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Venezuela. Iran is a large technologically advanced country with 90 million people fiercely proud of their independence. Their geography is mountainous and challenging to attack. They have expected an attack from the US and have been preparing for a long time. Many Iranians are willing to die to defend their independence.
The global economy is fragile because the system requires growth to not collapse, limits have slowed growth, the debt we have used to force growth has grown to dangerous levels, and limits to growth are becoming stronger.
In response to being attacked by a much more powerful country, Iran is responding asymmetrically by harming the economies of the US and its allies.
The most significant thing Iran has done so far is to close the Strait of Hormuz through which 20% of global oil produced, and 40% of global oil imported, flows.
Also important, Iran has attacked Qatar forcing it to stop producing 20% of the world’s LNG, and significant quantities of fertilizer and other important materials.
CACTUS explains that a modest persistent degrowth of the economy is sufficient to trigger a cascading collapse of complexity and modernity.
The size of the economy is roughly proportional to oil consumption. Closing the Strait of Hormuz for a period longer than importing countries have oil reserves would roughly reduce global GDP by 20%, which is more than sufficient to trigger an unrecoverable collapse, if Hormuz remains closed long enough.
It’s unlikely anyone accurately knows how long the strait can remain closed without triggering a collapse, however most countries on average have about 90 days of oil in storage, and so 120 days of closure is a reasonable guess.
Note that China is an exception and seems to have anticipated the US attack on Iran by stockpiling about 120 days of oil reserves.
Given that other critical materials like fertilizer, petrochemicals, aluminum, and food to feed middle east countries pass through the strait, and the extreme complexity of global supply chains, and the fragility of our financial bubbles, and the likelihood that some importing countries will not have 90 days of oil and LNG buffers, it is reasonable to assume 120 days is a best case and serious problems will begin before that.
We don’t know for how long Iran wants, or is able, to keep the strait closed. We don’t know if the US can force the strait to reopen, or how long it might take to repair any damage and return to normal operations.
We do know that cumulative damage is being done to the global economy every day the strait remains closed, and the risk of a collapse increases with time.
The US attack on Iran has other significant risks.
Projecting advanced military force a long way from home is expensive and difficult to sustain. Doubly so given recent US support for Ukraine, and the fact the US does not have the industrial capacity it once had.
This means there is a reasonable chance Iran can win simply by surviving and outlasting the US.
A US loss to Iran would be catastrophic for obvious geopolitical reasons. It’s hard to imagine the US would not escalate to nuclear weapons if faced with a loss, and even less hard to imagine if Israel felt its survival was at stake. A nuclear attack on Iran would create a significant risk of nuclear escalation from its allies China and Russia.
Lastly, there are many complex rivalries, hatreds, and interests among middle east countries, and the countries that depend on their oil. Escalation of the Iran war in unpredictable and uncontrollable directions is probable. We can see escalation is already starting.
In summary, by attacking Iran, the US has created extreme risks.
What could be worth these risks?
Certainly not the reasons given by US leaders.
Nor the alternative reasons given by observers.
US Motivation
US power today depends on a strong military, owning the world’s reserve currency, and having access to sufficient energy and materials.
The standard of living for US citizens, and the jobs of most US leaders, depend on sustaining US power.
The industrial capacity of China already far exceeds the US.
The US military is stronger than the Chinese military, however China is using its superior industrial capacity to catch up.
Last month China announced it now intends to compete with the US for “global reserve currency status” and to become a “financial powerhouse”.
To retain its power, the US must defend its reserve currency, and to do so needs the world’s strongest military.
US military strength is dependent on many rare earth minerals, and China controls almost all of them.
Last year China demonstrated its willingness to withhold rare earth minerals exports in retaliation against US tariffs, and is now blocking many exports destined for US military applications.
The US is working to create alternate sources of rare earth minerals, but this is an expensive decade-ish project. Those of us with CACTUS awareness understand this plan for US self-sufficiency may never succeed.
Access to rare earth minerals is therefore an existential issue for the US.
China is the only source of rare earth minerals in the short term and the US needs leverage to force China to provide them.
China is the world’s largest importer of oil at about 12 million barrels a day.
Roughly half of this oil comes from countries the US controls like Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The other half comes from countries the US does not control like Russia and Iran.
The US attempted to get control of Russian oil via the Ukraine war, but that plan failed.
China imports 90% of Iran’s oil, which is about 1.5 million barrels a day, and pays with Chinese Renminbi.
Iran’s oil represents about 13% of China’s oil imports, and while not huge, is strategically important because the US does not control Iran, and because Iran accepts Renminbi as payment, and because China receives a price discount for being Iran’s largest and most reliable customer, and because depletion is making it difficult to find alternate sources of oil.
The reason the US accepted the extreme risks of attacking Iran is now clear.
To retain its military power and reserve currency the US needs leverage to force China to provide it with rare earth minerals, and the US intends to use Iran’s oil as that leverage.
The US aggression has been extreme, including killing 160 young schoolgirls without an apology, suggesting there is an urgency behind the US strategy.
The urgency comes from the dependence of stocks on flows. The US military has a reasonable stock of weapons, but they are being depleted faster than they are being replaced due to the demands of Ukraine, the complexity of US weapons, and the hollowing out of US industrial capacity. In addition, some weapons cannot be replaced until the rare earth minerals problem is solved.
So, the US has decided to go all in with the goal of pounding Iran into quick submission. As stated earlier, this creates a serious risk of nuclear escalation if Iran proves to be tough enough to take the beating and not submit.
Conclusion
Those of us that are overshoot aware and see through the Debt, Energy, Ecology, or CACTUS lenses know that we are facing limits to growth, and big changes are on the horizon.
We know there are much bigger forces in play beneath the surface of the rare earth minerals for oil story.
There are no doubt people in the US government whose job it is to understand the threats of non-renewable energy and mineral depletion, but I expect most US leaders are like 99.9% of all people and aggressively deny these threats exist.
The point is that a coherent story to explain the US attack on Iran does not require overshoot awareness, or even a deep understand of energy.
US leaders are just normal ignorant people in denial trying to do the best they can for their citizens.
The reason US leaders are lying to us about why they attacked Iran is now clear.
US leaders can’t possibly say that if China does not provide rare earth minerals the US military will be weak, and the US will lose reserve currency status, and the standard of living for Americans will fall 50+%, so we have to kill thousands of Iranians, and spend billions of dollars, and risk World War III, and risk collapsing the global economy, to force China to give them to us.
Notice that none of the 6 reasons US leaders have provided for attacking Iran, nor the 6 reasons pundits have provided, that I listed above, are even close to the real reason.
In addition, I follow closely about 20 geopolitical analysts, plus maybe another 20 less closely, all of which I trust have sufficient integrity to at least attempt to accurately report WHAT is going on, however none of these 40 people are even close to accurately explaining WHY the US attacked Iran.
None, not even close! How is this possible?
Notice that all 12 incorrect explanations have one thing in common. They all avoid discussing limits to growth, or non-renewable resource depletion, or scarcity, or bubbles, or living beyond our means.
Anything associated with overshoot is taboo because it is a too unpleasant reality for our brains to accept as explained by the MORT theory.
We are a uniquely smart species capable of understanding many complex topics, unless the topic is really unpleasant.
It’s an amazing phenomenon to observe and is why I started un-Denial.
As a final point I want to repeat a point I made in my last essay.
There is a significant cost to the fact that most leaders do not understand CACTUS. The attack on Iran, even in the best case of the war ending quickly, has done serious damage to the global economy. We are in the end stage of an advanced civilization, and damage does not heal well now. There are too many demands for maintenance and repair, and we don’t have the material wealth to address them all.
Every time we recklessly break something, as the US just did by attacking Iran, we reduce the time to collapse.
A wise species would find a way to spread awareness of CACTUS so that we can extend the time to collapse and use some of our remaining resources to improve the quality of life for the survivors and other species.
Achieving awareness is a challenge because even if CACTUS was explained to our leaders with compelling evidence, most would still deny CACTUS due to the human genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities as explained by Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory.
I proposed one promising idea for spreading CACTUS awareness in my last essay. Hopefully others reading this will come up with other ideas.
P.S. We now understand why good people like Tulsi Gabbard who campaigned against the war have been silent, and why Trump flip-flopped on war promises.
P.P.S. We now also understand why the US decapitated Venezuela.
In 2025 China imported about 600K barrels per day, representing 80% of Venezuela’s exported oil, in exchange for Renminbi or barter repayment of debt.
After the US kidnapped Venezuela’s president in January 2026, oil exported to China fell to 50K barrels per day or less.
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:
Social unrest everywhere is rising because living standards are falling and the wealth gap is widening.
Geopolitical tensions are rising.
Democracies are oscillating between wider extremes.
Most countries have historically high levels of growing debt.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 to 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:
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.
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.
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.
Trump reversed his no more regime change promises after being sworn in and briefed about US debt and oil forecasts.
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.
Propaganda is successfully being used to convince citizens that regime change operations are to prevent terrorism or drug trafficking, not to control oil.
China is stockpiling strategic oil reserves.
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.
The UK, having drained its own oil reserves, now wants war with energy rich Russia.
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 stored as coal.
The sixth mass extinction is underway.
Seven of nine planetary boundaries critical for survival have already been crossed including climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, fresh water, nitrogen cycle, pollution, and ocean acidification.
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 on the Fermi Paradox:
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.
Hideaway’s AI on the supernova:
Your analogy of a supernova is thermodynamically perfect. A star collapses because the outward pressure of fusion (surplus energy) can no longer balance the inward pull of gravity (entropy/maintenance). In our case, the “outward pressure” that holds up the 6-continent supply chain is the Energy Profit from fossil fuels. Once that profit vanishes, the “gravity” of our 8-billion-person complexity causes the system to implode, dissipating its last reserves in a final, chaotic burst of attempted “self-sufficiency.”
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.
Biological/Ecological Resources (functionally non-renewable): Topsoil, old-growth forests, biodiversity, coral reefs, major fish stocks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Why do we have to make the transition in the next 80 years?
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.
Art Berman today responded to the many critics that piled on him after his last essay in which he reversed his prior warnings about oil depletion by doubling down.
Technology, capital, and price—not just geology—now dictate oil supply. The 2005-2014 price boom unlocked more oil than anyone expected. Today, financial markets and geopolitics—not depletion—drive the oil game.
Shale changed everything, unleashing a massive new supply. Peak Oil still pretends it doesn’t exist—won’t even put it on a chart. That’s why it’s a dying paradigm. It had its moment and reshaped my world view in important ways. May it rest in peace.
If you listen to the Art Berman that existed a year ago, and compare him to today’s Art Berman, and observe he did not correct or retract any of his prior analysis, you have to conclude that some powerful force is in play, like perhaps mRNA transfection brain damage, or grandchildren induced MORT.
Today’s essay by un-Denial friend paqnation (aka Chris) takes a fresh big picture look at the uniqueness of humans and concludes our use of fire is at the core, and is the real creator and destroyer.
Modernity’s colossal level of separation & superiority beliefs is perfectly valid. It’s the only rational/sane choice. Although it’s not a choice, it automatically comes with breaking through the three sacred energy constraints of fire, agriculture, and fossil fuels. And the belief is exponential. Grows stronger with every so-called step of progress. Only one group out of billions slipped through the cracks and pulled off all three. Nobody else has ever come close to breaking just one. Pretty damn separate & superior if you ask me. Thinking that I can get people’s worldviews to turn upside down is the only irrational/insane choice. That’s why I’m done trying and more interested in preaching to the choir.
Planets can have one species completely dominating it for long periods of time (dinosaurs 150 million years). But the golden rule is still the same: no broken energy constraints allowed. Fire by itself is not evil, at all. Harnessing it is. Everyone misses this point when trying to break down our story and how we got here and what we need to do to change things. It’s too dark at first, that’s why. Whether its Daniel Quinn and his takers & leavers, Nate Hagens and the great simplification, or Michael Dowd with his sustainable vs unsustainable cultures. It’s all predicated on the notion that you can break certain energy constraints and still fit in with Mother Earth and the rest of life. Spoiler alert: you can’t.
My entire overshoot/collapse journey has been full of ideas about agriculture and fossil fuels being evil. But almost zero talk about fire. For example, Quinn’s “takers” concept is built around the fact that humans turned the second energy constraint of captured solar energy into totalitarian agriculture (and if we had done agriculture differently, our world would be much better). In his view, two broken energy constraints are perfectly acceptable. Quinn was magnificently underestimating those built in exponential separation & superiority worldviews.
Humans are no longer a species. I say you cease being one as soon as you get to that unique position of breaking the first energy constraint. It’s actually shocking that we have allowed ourselves to still be labeled as such. It invokes some kind of connectedness. I’m in favor of going all the way with separation and removing humans from those labels of species, primates, mammals and putting us in a whole new separate category. It might even help with this insanely incorrect line of reasoning that certain broken energy constraints are acceptable (this would have saved me a lot of time on my journey).
As soon as the first constraint is broken, the countdown to the second one begins. It took 1.5 million years for the homo genus to conquer fire. Then took another 1.5 million years to get to agriculture. Pretty easy to accept why the first one took so long, but why so long for the 2nd? Most of my sources have said because of the Holocene period. 12,000 years ago, the climate got warmer and stabilized for the first time in a long time. In the 1.5 million years since we conquered fire, climate was never ripe for agriculture until 12kya? Hmmm. But its the wrong question because human brains were not equipped to pull off agriculture until only recently. We had our last major evolutionary process about 100,000 years ago (in other words this exact version of us today is 100kyo). I’m talking about the MORT theory.
If you believe this theory, as I do, then you know this was an astronomically rare situation with evolution unlocking our extended theory of mind (eToM) and mind over reality transition (MORT) at the same time. Without these evolutionary processes, we would still only be at one broken energy constraint. And if we had never figured out fire, we would not have been in a position to receive those evolutionary gifts/curses that gave us the capability to bust through agriculture.
So my question about the climate being ripe for agriculture changes to the last 100k years (ever since we’ve been capable). And yes, the Holocene is the only time in that stretch where the conditions were ripe. (another hidden bonus with MORT theory is that it gives me very logical answers to some of these questions).
In our group essay I had this line, “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”. This has been growing stronger by the day. Putting the first constraint into the same importance (evilness) category as #2 and #3 seemed like a big reach. But I now have it as the most important because it’s the only possible way to get to the much more ecologically destructive agriculture and then final solution of fossil fuels.
I asked Rob for some help on this topic. As always, he came through with some excellent advice:
Humans are the only species to use fire and this behavior has profound implications. This is a very interesting topic with many dimensions you could explore. For example:
Predigesting food by cooking allowed resources to be shifted from the gut to the brain (see Richard Wrangham).
Increasing productivity beyond what muscles alone can accomplish.
Disrupting the natural carbon cycle to influence the climate.
Why is our species the only species that leveraged fire in a big way, despite its obvious advantage to reproductive fitness. Usually when something is really helpful, like say eyesight, evolution “discovers” and deploys it multiple times.
I started to get overwhelmed when I began to research Rob’s suggestions, almost turned me off from writing this essay. So I did what any true Empire Baby would do, I aborted on the research. (A good future essay would be to take his 1st and 2nd points and tie it in with how fire is all about slowly preparing you for MORT). But here is a quick thought on each of his topics:
This is the main ingredient that allowed evolution to make that freakishly rare final version of us 100kya. I suspect Hideaway’s vitamin B12 theory to play heavy into this: Perhaps the need for B12 supplementation is attached to the gene that gave us ability to deny bad outcomes and believe in magical solutions to problems (god), and the ability to talk, while meaning only those that ate meat thrived in early Homo sapiens development, separating us from other Homo species.
More help in getting us to that final version. These first two are telling me that fire is the one and only key to unlocking MORT (all the way).
Gloriously and stunningly separate & superior.
Because evolution is as confused as us. We are “off the grid”.
Fire is a constant taking from the planet, and a constant exuding of pollution. It should be the beginning stage of Quinn’s “takers”. If you are cutting down live trees to burn, then you can add a thousand other negative effects. Let’s stick with deadwood only. That piece of wood is going to be feasted on by fungi, moss, and a million other life forms until it is completely gone or decomposes back into the soil. But you just took it away from them and made it disappear. In other words, you stole it. (if you had eaten it or made tools/shelter with it, that would be ok because its more in line with the rest of life “on the grid”). And you didn’t quite make it all disappear either. You created some pollution that is now in the atmosphere and will eventually have to be dealt with. It’s so radically new from the planet’s perspective. First time ever that a species is stealing (constantly) and polluting (constantly), all for their advantage and at the expense of everyone else. But no serious worldwide damage because population can never explode (need agriculture). But very serious internal damage with staying on the correct path of life.
I love Dowd, Quinn, and Hagens. They were big parts of my journey. MORT is what prevents them from seeing this. Focusing on the energy constraints led me to fire and now it’s as obvious as some of these overshoot concepts. Understanding MORT has helped me get to a place that is probably the hardest to get to. The very top of collapse mountain where the unthinkable awaits: If we can’t even have fire, then what’s the fucking point? LOL. And that’s what breaking energy constraints does right there. It creates something (not a species) that is actually complaining about the meaning of it all. So damn separate & superior, my god!
If it’s all about life, then the planet has a purpose. To provide resources round the clock. Life’s purpose is to thrive (aka: Do whatever it takes). The two mix very well together. Until an ultra-rare unnatural event tilts the scales. Like 66mya when a big asteroid hit earth. Or 1.5mya when a curious species started playing around with fire. Same result. Most if not all life on earth eventually wiped out. From Life’s point of view, it’s very easy to see that harnessing fire is not acceptable and is off limits. Ditto for Mother Earth.
It seems to me the only purpose of conquering fire is to get to MORT. Purpose of MORT is to get to agriculture. Purpose of agriculture is to get to fossil fuels. Purpose of fossil fuels is to eliminate life in a speedy fashion. Purpose of eliminating life is so that the Great Reset can get the planet (resource provider) back to no broken energy constraints. LOL. Sounds biblical. And fire is the apple. At the very least it’s a hell of a good fail-safe plan. And all of the terms we use to describe human problems like parable of the tribes, tragedy of the commons, multipolar trap, etc.… they don’t apply to us. They apply to conquering fire. “It just takes one” to create the Great Reset.
Five hundred years ago our population was only 500 million and 90% of them were “on the farm”. Would have been impossible to deduce that we are not a species. Today it’s much more obvious with 8.1 billion and 2% on the farm. Getting this far into the journey is not for everyone. One of my favorite collapse writers, Tom Murphy, can barely even consider it. Few months ago, I mentioned to him that Leavers had not figured out how to bust though the energy constraints and that’s all it is. If they could have figured it out, they too would have become Takers in a heartbeat. Tom had more to say but his core message was, “I prefer to operate on the premise that we’re not just rotten to the core and thus are wasting our time trying to find better ways to live”. Very anthropocentric, Thomas😊. And too much denial for my lack of denial to accept.
Starting your overshoot journey first leads you to understanding how unsustainable and destructive fossil energy is. That’s the easy constraint to “get”. Stick with it long enough and you’ll think the same about agriculture. But that’s usually the end of the journey and most can’t even make it that far. Lonesome territory at the top of collapse mountain. But once you get here, your journey is a wrap. You will see how silly all this frantic and desperate clinging on is (like Nate’s The Great Simplification). You’ll especially get a kick out of anything involving an awakening of consciousness or a paradigm shift. Dowd had a great line, “if you don’t understand overshoot, you will misinterpret everything that’s important”. Time to change “overshoot” to “fire”.
The good and the bad of this outlook, good first. It will put an end to those “rotten to the core” thoughts that humans are hardwired for destruction. Conquering fire is what’s hardwired for destruction, period. The simplification makes it much easier to stop focusing on all those things that are hardwired into breaking energy constraints (extreme overshoot & ecological degradation, Wetiko, MPP, climate change, collapse, etc). Which in turn gives me a much better chance of letting go of it all and just sit back and genuinely be entertained by watching it unfold. Helps me to understand why humanity is drenched in evil. Which actually helps me to forgive myself and the rest of humanity for going down this road. (kind of like the famous “it’s not your fault” scene from Good Will Hunting.
And the blame game starts to evaporate. No longer valid for me to point the finger at elites, USA, white skin, politicians, technology, etc. But the best benefit is the same relief as when I found un-Denial/MORT. Being able to understand the batshit crazy times we are in is the greatest joy/relief one can receive post red pill. It makes swallowing the pill (which I regretted many times) much more bearable.
Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Overshootland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Now the bad. Obviously, the big one is the darkness of it all. Understanding that there is not supposed to be any intelligence higher than pre fire (in the universe), will mess with your modern (human centered) brain. If you’re not careful you could end up in a very nihilistic state of mind. Also, this might make you doubt or cloud up any religious beliefs you have (My spiritual advisor on this site, Charles, and his views about “the world is 1 without 2. It is as it is and not some imaginary else. There is nothing to be either fearful, angry, saddened or cheerful about. It is just as it is.” LOL, three years ago I would have dismissed him as a lunatic and now I’m all about trying to find that exact frequency).
And the entertainment value for movies/tv is dropping significantly for me (I’m losing interest in watching off grid life pretending to be comedic and dramatic). But I’ll take the tradeoff because certain music is now hitting me on a much deeper level.
In closing, I would like to give you my quick pitch. If you can’t get yourself to agree that fire and agriculture are evil, then move over to fossil fuels. Any events in history that can be traced to using fossil energy (and that no other species had ever done prior to or since) is absolutely not acceptable and completely off limits per life and the planet. Fire is the one that starts it all. I’m sure there are important evolutionary events (or freak accidents) that lead to fire, but I’m sticking with the flame as the beginning of evil (going off grid).
Over 100 billion stars in our galaxy (and ours is an average one). Two trillion Milky Ways in the universe. Certainly, there is much life out there. If MORT is as rare as we think, then most species that break the 1st energy constraint never get to the 2nd one. That paints an incorrect picture that fire is acceptable. MORT is inevitable for everyone who cracks the 1st barrier. It’s all part of the fail-safe plan. (if you don’t believe MORT theory then it should be even easier to see that fire automatically leads to agriculture). If MORT is astronomically rare, then so is harnessing fire.
The maximum power principle (MPP) always frustrated me because I was looking at it wrong. I thought it meant that if you run the human experiment 100 times, every time it’s going to play out similar to our story. I was taking it too literal. Every planet that has had a Great Reset to get back to no broken energy constraints will look identical as far as the processes in chronological order; new species, fire, MORT, agriculture, fossil fuels, extinction. This fail-safe plan is another word for MPP. But the way each planet gets there can be drastically different. I’m sure some had no concept of monetary value. Or some went all in with space travel. Others may have avoided war altogether. And maybe some even perfected the equality aspect and truly lived in a utopian civilization (for their species only of course). And as hard as it is to believe, I bet some even did it much worse than us.
But regardless of how they got to their “Peak of what’s possible in the universe”, they all have the same thing in common. They’re off the grid from the rest of life (no longer a species) and they are solely responsible for their planet’s Great Reset because they started playing around with fire (something that had never been done on that planet prior). This simplifies things quite a bit for me about our insane civilization (and human behavior). Everything after breaking the first energy constraint is irrelevant. Good, evil, indifference… irrelevant. (See, I sound like Charles already 😊)
I like this quote from Leave the World Behind because it sums up everything and is so easily understood from the top of collapse mountain:
We fuck each other over all the time, without even realizing it. We fuck every living thing on this planet over and think it’ll be fine because we use paper straws and order the free-range chicken. And the sick thing is, I think deep down we know we’re not fooling anyone. I think we know we’re living a lie. An agreed-upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring how awful we really are.
Today’s guest essay by paqnation (aka Chris) tackles a challenging topic with deep ties to Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory which inspires un-Denial.com.
Chris discusses yet another strange behavior that is unique to our species.
And how hard it is to do the right thing in our modern world.
I have been fixating on evil lately (on an individual level). And by evil I am just limiting it to anything that degrades ecological integrity. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that 100% of my everyday actions are steeped in evil. There is nothing I do that does not involve evil towards the planet. Just typing this essay on my internet computer in my house powered by electricity with the heater on. Everything in my home used up resources and fossil fuels to get to me. And I pay for it by working at a corporation that only creates more evil in the world. Jeez! Too much evil within evil within evil, to even comprehend. Driving my car is the same story. Ditto for eating my grocery store bought food. Every action a person takes in this civilization already has loads of evil baked into it. So what is the opposite of this. Planting trees, gardening, rewilding land, composting my toilet waste? Yes, but I’m sure there is lots of evil within that, just to get to the non-evil deed. Besides, I don’t do any of those things. And even if I did, ok fine, maybe I get my 100% evil actions down to 99%.
It’s obvious that there is a threshold for an acceptable amount of evil that Mother Earth can tolerate and would even expect. Heck, just picking up a piece of deadwood and using it to make a fire is evil. So there is no way to avoid it. The ecological overshoot graphs we’ve all seen time and time again explain what this “threshold” limit looks like. Just another thing that comes down to balance, harmony, and equilibrium. Which, of course, human civilization, by default, cannot achieve.
That got me focusing on my greatest act of evil. It feels like something related to my eating habits would be the winner. The wasting of all the food throughout my lifetime. Or just the day-by-day participation in this horrendous cycle of how we eat in today’s world. But this is more about the accumulation that makes it so evil. I’m looking for a single act that can be labeled “most evil thing I’ve ever done”. Flying on a plane maybe? Prior to my awakening to reality, I was guilty of some horrible acts. On multiple occasions I have dumped trash/junk out in the desert to avoid landfill fees. When I was a teenager, I once changed my car oil and dumped the old oil on the side of the road. At least I’ve never started a forest fire, which has to take the cake for the most evil one person can do (or maybe I’m not thinking hard enough). But I believe I have a clear-cut winner that most of us will be guilty of and does not happen until we are dead.
A lot of people write about nature’s contract or the social contract. Here is a great link on the topic by Tom Murphy: In Breach of Contract.
The core of these “contracts” seems to me is the create/sustain/end part. The “end” portion is where I think our biggest act of evil may rest. We are the only species in which the dead do not return naturally to the eco-system.
Long-life coffins, clothes & decor, deep burial and embalming (which contaminates the soil and groundwater) result in the dead remaining intact for a very long time. Overall, embalming for burial uses over 800,000 gallons of toxic chemicals every year. As well as the costs thru time of mowing around your grave and re-erecting your crumbling gravestone. Not knowing much about this topic, I found out that we put coffins (wooden and metal) inside bigger cement coffins. Our fear of critters eating our corpse is laughably insane. This type of burial practice is just over a hundred years old, which makes perfect sense considering the insanity of modernity and being alive in the most abnormal moment in human history.
Cremation (which I have always preferred) is even worse and turns your body into air pollution and barren ash. Studies of emissions reveal that cremation turns people into at least 46 different pollutants. Some of these, like nitrous oxides and heavy metals, remain in the atmosphere for up to 100 years causing ozone depletion and acid rain. Cremation emits mercury, sulfur dioxide, and, in the US, about 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions into our air every year. Our bodies, on average, take three hours to burn in a crematorium, using up large quantities of fuels like electricity and natural gas. Once again, our fear of critters eating our corpse is laughably insane.
I was bouncing around the internet to get this info. And maybe my stats and figures can be debated, but I think everyone who is this far along into their collapse journey can easily understand how giving my 220 pounds of resources back to Mother Earth is much more beneficial than disintegrating my resources into ashes or keeping them preserved in a metal box inside of a concrete box. (and this is why it feels like my final act will be my most evil)
I can almost hear the absurd conversation with our “Creator/Sustainer/End” in my head. It goes something like:
Mother Earth: Ok, here’s the contract. I am going to create you using my resources, then sustain you with my resources, and when you die I will end you by consuming your resources so that I can keep creating and sustaining in this beautiful cycle of life. Deal?
Modern Humans: Ok, I’ll take you up on your offer for creating and sustaining me, but when it comes time for the end portion, I will renege on our deal and not allow you to use my resources for your benefit. In fact, I’m gonna go out with one last bang and continue harming you even though I’m dead. Deal?
Take, take, take. Never give. Just follows the normal human civilization theme of “everything we do and how we do it is wrong (evil)”.
Natural burials and green burials seem like a better way to go. A quick definition in case you’ve never heard of green burial: designed to have a minimal environmental impact and conserve natural resources. It emphasizes simplicity and sustainability. In a typical green burial, the body is not cremated, prepared with chemicals, or buried in a concrete vault. And some of the green burial sites sell it with options where you are buried with no casket and then a tree is planted on top of you. Having a tree sprout above my corpse is a beautiful idea that I would have mocked (or been grossed out by) prior to my “awakening”.
Unfortunately, the cost is high and availability is low. Average pricing (for my state) is $5,000. And for comparison, traditional burial is $8,000 and cremation is $1,500 (although, when my Dad passed away a few years ago, the cremation cost $2,500. No service or fancy urn. Just the bare minimum). And it looks like there is an even better way called human composting. Which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. But this is only available in a handful of states (mine is not one of them). And cost is $5,000 – $7,000.
I will definitely be looking into these alternatives more because I prefer my final act to not be evil if I can help it (and afford it). Might be my one and only good deed towards ecological integrity. There should be a legal, easy & inexpensive way to put our dead naked bodies into the soil for two obvious reasons. First and foremost, so that Mother Earth gets full maximum benefit. And second so that modern humans can at least honor a portion of our contract.
One last note. I came up with this topic by staring at the table below. Sounds weird, I know. I created this simple table a while back (which I’m sure can be nitpicked to death) for the sole purpose of keeping me on track. My bargaining phase gets me to waste time chasing magical solutions. Looking at this chart helps bring me back down to reality. Another positive outcome is that it gets me thinking about stuff I that I’ve never thought about.
Thanks for listening, Chris
Rob here, I can confirm Chris’ research because one of my university summer jobs was making precast concrete coffin liners.
Chris’ essay reminded me of a comedy skit on peak oil from the 2005 play by Robert Newman titled Apocalypso Now.
It’s a fun reminder of how many of us doomers thought 20 years ago.
If you’re in a hurry, skip ahead to the 6 minute mark for the relevant joke.
It has been a hard road fighting against corrupt entities that I never knew existed to such an extent in the halls of power. And against the relentless propaganda that has seemingly usurped most if not all of academia and medicine.
It has been a hard road fighting against corrupt entities that I never knew existed to such an extent in the halls of power. And against the relentless propaganda that has seemingly usurped most if not all of academia and medicine.
This account came about because I knew that we had been lied to in February 2020 about the origin of COVID and with the help of others we were able to prove it.
Since that time there has been a pyre of lies that we have had to unpick, whilst showing ourselves to be the ones that endeavoured to uphold the values of real science that required the pursuit of truth over politics and corruption.
The time is right to retire now because two things have happened.
The first is that the public is now becoming aware not only of what is true, but how to discern what is truth against that which is untrue. I believe that was my task and much of that work has been done.
The second is that the threats against me from groups with proven ties to pharma lobby groups have intensified. The people involved know who they are and they attempt to justify their activity by creating a bogeyman story directed at us. But that’s all it is. When the dust settles and the horrendous death tally is finally counted, the people that will be most responsible are those that used their unlimited resources (supported by pharma corporations and corrupted government departments with unlimited funds and power) to silence those of us whose only crime was to highlight scientifically evidenced dangers to the public about interventions that could – and did – cause death and disability.
Those groups – mainly #shotsheard in the US and #muttoncrew in the UK with their groupies on social media, all coordinated through a central point – are merely an extension of the same groups that did exactly the same things 20 years ago in relation to Vioxx (where 30,000 people died because doctors and scientists were threatened into silence) and before that thalidomide (where 20,000 children were born without limbs because doctors and scientists were threatened into silence).
We care about this but the majority of the public and the government appear not to. There are no resources available to us and the government – who many of you trusted – have never offered any resources or protection to accounts such as ours or the people behind them. On the contrary they have shown – in the US, UK, Europe, Canada and Australia – that they will be the ones to silence us. In some cases they have threatened to imprison us.
The public remain quiet. Anger is brewing but the government and media will ensure that that anger is directed at us – the very people who showed you where corruption and malfeasance exist in establishments that should be above reproach. I predict that there will be no public protests to “protect medical whistleblowers” or “bring back Jikkyleaks”. There will for instance be no public protest at the supreme court in Victoria where @realMarkHobart will be fighting for the right of a doctor to protect the fundamental and global right to bodily autonomy of patients. There will be no clamour for the pharma-affiliated bully organisations to be prosecuted for what they have done for the last 20 years. Nobody was jailed for Vioxx – or thalidomide – because the public did not demand that they were.
The media played the biggest part. They universally disparaged people as “antivaxxers” who merely wanted to retain their human rights as declared in the UN declaration on human rights. Instead they protected the very people who created this pandemic (and by extension previous pandemics). And more importantly they failed to give any voice to those of us with scientific and medical expertise who tried to raise concerns and advocate merely for the retention of the human right to bodily autonomy.
Instead, the media gave a platform to the likes of David Gorski, Tony Fauci, Albert Bourla and Peter Daszak as if they were saints instead of the face of a global biomedical mafia. Their support group of minions who threaten scientists and non-scientists, scouring their personal files and tracking their homes, children and employers know who they are. So do I. Everything is archived.
The result of this collusion between pharma, government and media (with minions acting on their behalf for a pittance in reward) was millions of deaths with not a sniff of culpability. This is not their first rodeo, but this time instead of 30,000 deaths it was 6 million and counting. And the general public never raised an eyebrow in criticism of the biomedical corporations and governmental and military entities responsible and acting in lockstep.
So the result will remain. 6 million deaths and counting this time. The next time will likely be more. And if the public again rely on the media without question to guide them through it will never stop. There is too much money to be made and power to be gained. Why would those involved stop when there was not a single protest at any regulator or any government or academic institution despite the fact that deaths were known to have occurred and been covered up with no transparency from government agencies – who should have been desperate to release every document they possess to prove to the people that they were above reproach.
The silencing of this account is just a symptom of a disease so insidious that cannot remain untreated. One person – or mouse – cannot treat this disease. I have served my time here as far as I possibly can and must now devote time to other avenues, for what they are worth.
But without the help of the public we cannot do any more. Apathy feeds corruption and only the public en masse can stop feeding it.
To those that have supported this account please now that I appreciate everything that you have done and many thousands, if not millions, either do already or will do so in time.
For now I will bow out. I will continue for the time being to interact with other accounts posts, replies and existing DMs. But there will be no more new posts, exposures or #Gates on this platform until real protections are put in place for whistleblowers.
Just one caveat.. if the threats directed at me or those around me persist or resurface, I will have no choice but to return.
Good night. God speed.
And may the #mousearmy continue its fight for truth and against corruption in science.
Thanks to Dr. Ajit Varki for making me aware of this blog by the Mortal Atheist.
It’s vanishingly rare to find anyone that writes about Varki’s MORT theory and that understands that broad awareness of the theory is the only viable path to mitigating the consequences of human overshoot and preserving some of our best accomplishments.
I mostly agree with what the author says except the final sentence:
Who should read this book? Fans of Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker.
I would change this conclusion to:
Who should read this book? Every person on the planet who is working to shift our species to a more sustainable path because all of your efforts are failing and will continue to fail until we confront MORT.
Here’s a novel thought: what if we owe the incredible super-intelligence of our species to ourability to deny death? Years ago, researcher Danny Brower shared this thought with Ajit Varki during a chance encounter. When Varki reached back out years later, having never forgotten the conversation, he was shocked to discover Brower had died. But Brower had left behind a draft manuscript detailing his theory, what he called “Mind over Reality:” that Homo sapiens was the only species ever to develop a super-intelligence because we were the only species ever to cross the enormous evolutionary barrier of reality denial. Varki took up the manuscript, finished and published the book: Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind.
The barrier of denial
“Why is it that only humans are able to carry out so many special mental functions that seem missing from all other highly intelligent species, some of which have been around for millions of years longer than we have?” This curiosity fascinated Brower. Why was Homo sapiens the only species ever to become really, really smart? Especially when being this smart has made us the most successful species on the planet. Surely hyperintelligence is an evolutionary boon that should have emerged more than once. But it didn’t, not even in other hominid species or chimpanzees, our closest living relatives.
The first barrier in getting smart is a rare convergence of several biological and environmental factors. Varki identifies many: the species must be highly social but also long-lived, have a stable body temperature (to maintain the metabolism necessary to reliably feed the brain), and be born very early, undergoing extreme postnatal development. So, getting smart was a significant biological barrier. But there are many other social mammals (and some birds) that meet these criteria… why didn’t natural selection and evolution act on their brains in the same way? There’s lots of genetic variation to work with, and the vertebrate organization of brains was established hundreds of millions of years ago. So where are all the other super-intelligent creatures? The crux of Brower’s “Mind over Reality” theory was that there was an additional, almost insurmountable psychological evolutionary barrier, which is the focus of this book. It states: only if a species develops full awareness and higher intelligence while simultaneously developing an ability to deny its own mortality, would it reap any benefits. Otherwise, intelligence and self-awareness would be a negative fitness event.
Let’s examine why. When we speak of a “full awareness” or “higher intelligence,” what we mean is a fully developed theory of mind – the cognitive wiring that allows us to imagine the minds of others. Several other species are self-aware, and some probably possess rudimentary theory of mind (like a green monkey that can deceive another monkey into abandoning its banana hoard). But no species other than Homo sapiens possesses a full theory of mind that allows it to extend itself into the past and future, develop judicial systems, spin fantasies, create religion, torture, or play organized sports. No, for this you need a full and complete understanding of the minds of others. Brower argued that the critical boundary that kept other species out was that the benefits of a full theory of mind could not be realized unless it was simultaneously accompanied by an ability to deny mortality. Consider this, you are an early hominid who is self-aware and now possesses an awareness of others as independent agents. Then, someone in your group dies. You’re smart enough to deduce that this means you will die… but the threat of death is unavoidable – you are now under constant predation from your own intelligence. The anxiety you feel would be inescapable and totally bewildering. You probably wouldn’t have a lot of sex or be terribly interested in challenging the group leader for dominance (after all, you could die! I must admit, it’s morbidly amusing to imagine some lone hominid a hundred thousand years ago, staring up at the sky and feeling the crush of existential dread… the world’s first nihilist). But now imagine that you develop a full theory of mind and the ability to subconsciously suppress your mortality salience… well, now you’re cooking. How much better would you be at understanding your fellow humans, perhaps manipulating them… how much better at finding mates and achieving higher status within the group? But only if you can forget about the fact that you’re marching inexorably toward annihilation. Our most astonishing and critical accomplishment, the authors argue, was not a biological leap but a psychological one: ignorance.
Why deny death when you can deny everything?
It’s possible that death denial arose from the loss of several neural mechanisms, giving rise to the capability to deny reality wholescale. After all, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest Homo sapiens is incredibly adept at ignoring reality. Consider our disposition toward optimism, which is often irrational (as explored in Tali Sharot’s “The Optimism Bias”), or the fact that we smoke, eat sugary foods, and continue having children (even though childbirth is excruciating and dangerous). We jaywalk, gamble, text while driving, drive without seatbelts (drive at all), forgo writing wills or getting life insurance, follow silly superstitions, and buy homes on the Florida coast or along fault lines. And, of course, there’s religion – a denial of death if there ever was one. But so too is our desire for ultimate meaning illogical – the desire to believe we were put here for a purpose.
“. . .the alternative – that there is no meaning, no scheme – also implies that there is nothing after death. The deep anxiety and depression generated by this latter conclusion has kept mankind searching for the meaning of life for thousands of years and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. . . This reality denial at a deep level of our being is essentially universal, and is a fundamental quality of being human.”
But the most striking evidence of our reality denial still boils down to this:
“. . .you are nothing more than a sort of synthetic “hologram” composed of subatomic particles that originated from the Big Bang, which, when brought together in a particular combination, generated a brain, mind, and a conscious state – which in turn give you the introspection that allows you to read this book and understand it for the very, very, very brief space of time that you are alive. Why is it that despite understanding how absolutely, totally, and completely trivial you are in the enormity of this cosmic reality you can step out every day and act as if the universe is your oyster? Why are you not terrified and depressed by the fact that you are just the tiniest little transient blip in this enormous reality of time and space?”
The answer is: because your ancestors had the rare cognitive quirk of holding false beliefs and ignoring inconvenient truths. (I do appreciate the loveliness of this paradox: that science, our most rational endeavour, may reveal that we’re the most irrational species to ever exist… but that it’s this irrationality that allowed us to get so smart. It’s perfect, really).
Pros and cons
There are several benefits, obviously, to our denial (you mean aside from being self-aware without crippling existential anxiety at every waking turn?). Optimism and overconfidence can be nice… we’ve crossed oceans in shaky vessels, launched ourselves into space, and jumped off cliffs in primitive flying contraptions. Surely no rational being would partake in these misadventures. Bravery and courage can be marvelous, though they are often reality denial too. Becoming immersed in a movie or video game often means suspending belief for a short while. Even being able to shut out reality to get in “the zone” during a challenging physical or mental task is beneficial. But there are consequences. Our ability to ignore climate change or launch nuclear war is one. Our willingness to follow cult leaders into oblivion or dictators into genocide and crusades seems another. Varki even muses: “the fundamental forces that got us to this dilemma might be valid for any planet that harbors intelligent life.” That perhaps the reason we’ve seen no evidence of other intelligent intergalactic species is because the solution to the theory of mind barrier, reality denial, “ensures that no civilization of intelligent species will persist long enough to master long-distance space travel. . .” Even better: “. . . it is arguable that we are destined ultimately to destroy ourselves as a species – or, at the very least, to continue to cycle between well-developed civilization and catastrophic collapse, never reaching a technological state much beyond what we currently enjoy.”
Oh my gosh, how deliciously pessimistic.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
For these reasons, it’s probably essential that we recognize reality denial as a fundamental part of our nature. And maybe by understanding this subconscious hardwiring we can consciously change what may otherwise lead us to extinction-level catastrophe. To fight addiction, you must acknowledge you’re an addict. To fight denial, you must acknowledge its instinctiveness. We can’t get rid of this reality denial, but we can recognize it “and manage its pathological consequences.” Otherwise, we might just deny ourselves into extinction.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? We owe our hyperintelligence to our ability to deny death and ignore inconvenient truths.
Who should read this book? Fans of Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker.
