Deep Adaption

[mikepepler]

OK, here's my take on it.

The predicament is multi-fold, in no particular order:
- climate change
- resource depletion
- population

Primary root causes:
- Pride, which results in arrogance to other people and to nature, inability to admit your errors, considering yourself above some types of work, etc. It also contributes to the need to feel important, powerful and better than those around you. Everyone has it, but to varying degrees.
- Envy, which I guess follows on from pride - when you see you're not as rich, powerful or respected as someone else, leading you to attack or to compete.
- Greed, which I think can be separate from pride and envy - some people want to have more stuff/money/power when they already have more than all the people they know.
- A high discount rate on future benefits, which probably worked well in a simpler world, before fossil fuels came along.

I openly admit that some of my above views come from my Christian beliefs, but I expect other religions would say similar things, as would many atheists and agnostics that take the time to think about these issues.

Secondary root causes that followed the primary ones but are now so entrenched that they are almost as important:
- The view that nature is there to be exploited for our benefit.
- 'Progress', which I think can feed pride, greed and envy. The idea that everything should get faster, smarter, shinier, etc. every year, and that each generation should be better off than the last one.
- Interest-bearing debt. This is prohibited (to varying degrees) in Islam and the Hebrew Bible, if we'd stuck with that we wouldn't be tied into the current economic growth model.
- The existence of complex societies globally, such that any one of them can only collapse to a certain level before neighbours will step in to either help or take over - either of which arrests or reverses the collapse. The result is that there will eventually be a global collapse.
- Being in a hurry. I don't know what drives this, maybe it's an urge to get things done before we die, but people are forever rushing around, so want to travel by faster modes of transport, have ready-to-eat food, etc. all of which have an impact.

[vtsnowedin]

Gah that's Spoilers innit ?

Yes of course. Pardon me. I'm trying to figure out how to get US dollars to you in the in the form of Pounds or Euros so you don't have to exchange them and of course a signed hard bound copy plus postage is essential.

[UndercoverElephant]

Primary root causes:
- Pride, which results in arrogance to other people and to nature, inability to admit your errors, considering yourself above some types of work, etc. It also contributes to the need to feel important, powerful and better than those around you. Everyone has it, but to varying degrees.
- Envy, which I guess follows on from pride - when you see you're not as rich, powerful or respected as someone else, leading you to attack or to compete.
- Greed, which I think can be separate from pride and envy - some people want to have more stuff/money/power when they already have more than all the people they know.

But these are just naturally-occurring human character traits, all of which only exist because evolution put them there. They are there for a purpose, and the purpose is that on balance, humans with a tendency for pride, envy and greed had better survival chances than those without those tendencies.

This debate has been had on this site many times over the years, but there's no harm in repeating it, because this stuff is important. "Negative" character traits of this sort are counter-balanced in tribal societies by the fact that everybody intimately knows everybody else, and everybody really is in it together. So they aren't allowed to "get out of control". You can't have one member of the tribe sitting on 90% of the total wealth, because there's simply no way that the rest of the tribe would allow this to happen.

These things started to become a problem after the neolithic revolution when humans became sedentary and required banding together for mutual self-defence, which led to the existence of the first city-states and proto-empires. The they've never been solved, but up until the industrial revolution their consequences were localised. They blighted the lives of individual humans and sometimes resulted in localised ecological destruction, but the human operation on Earth wasn't big enough to cause global ecological problems. And we all know the rest of this story.

I don't know if the problems are solvable: I don't know whether it is possible for human culture to find a way to build a large civilisation where these psychological traits are successfully controlled to the point where that a large techno-industrial civilisation is ecologically sustainable in the long term. It doesn't seem very likely right now, but catastrophic collapses have ultimately led to progress in the past: the Black Death certainly did, for example. There are imaginable scenarios where something similar could happen again.

Secondary root causes that followed the primary ones but are now so entrenched that they are almost as important:
- The view that nature is there to be exploited for our benefit.
- 'Progress', which I think can feed pride, greed and envy. The idea that everything should get faster, smarter, shinier, etc. every year, and that each generation should be better off than the last one.
- Interest-bearing debt. This is prohibited (to varying degrees) in Islam and the Hebrew Bible, if we'd stuck with that we wouldn't be tied into the current economic growth model.
- The existence of complex societies globally, such that any one of them can only collapse to a certain level before neighbours will step in to either help or take over - either of which arrests or reverses the collapse. The result is that there will eventually be a global collapse.
- Being in a hurry. I don't know what drives this, maybe it's an urge to get things done before we die, but people are forever rushing around, so want to travel by faster modes of transport, have ready-to-eat food, etc. all of which have an impact.

Most of these things are cultural/contingent. They can be fixed more easily than your "primary" causes because they aren't in-built parts of humanity. But it is hard to see that happening without something pretty catastrophic happening first.

Something new and different is going to happen before very long. There's a collapse coming, and it is necessarily going to be fundamentally different to previous collapses, because what is collapsing is itself fundamentally different to anything that previously existed. I have some hunches about what might happen, but it is almost impossible in the current political climate to speak about it publicly. That will change quite fast when people can actually see global civilisation collapsing around them.

[UndercoverElephant]

I will say this much: I think that there's a multifaceted cultural bomb waiting to go off, involving Islam and the rest of the world, although primarily the Western (Christian/secular) world, and Israel. I think there's a very high chance that as industrialised civilisation collapses, the forces that are currently preventing a global war between Islam and the rest of the world, will no longer be able to keep that genie in its bottle. The Islamic world is going to be on the sharpest end of climate change, just as the oil begins to seriously run out, and as the demographics in that part of the world results in a massively unsustainable population. But at the same time, pressure on resources elsewhere will mean that nobody wants to take the tsunami of Islamic refugees. All of which is music to the ears of Islamic extremists.

Take all of that together and you have the perfect recipe for a conflict between Islam and the rest of the world. Islam will lose, and largely be destroyed. The consequences for the rest of the world are harder to predict. I can't help wondering if the biggest winners in the long run will be Russia and Canada, simply because they are best placed in terms of resources, especially land which will become more habitable the worse climate change gets.

[kenneal - lagger]

The root cause is our addiction to growth compounded, as I said above, by human greed and the desire of a few, by no means all, to acquire untold riches and power. Until we address the problem of the super rich, who are driving the growth model, we will get no where.

[vtsnowedin]

The root cause is our addiction to growth compounded, as I said above, by human greed and the desire of a few, by no means all, ....
...

Really Ken? Only a few? How many do you know that have taken vows of poverty and live like monks or hermits?
Granted only a few are the likes of Bill Gates but that is not due to a lack of wishing or a lack of trying.

[woodburner]

Monks? Poverty? That may be a perception, but the monastries were power bases sufficiently large that Henry VIII destroyed most of them.

[vtsnowedin]

Monks? Poverty? That may be a perception, but the monastries were power bases sufficiently large that Henry VIII destroyed most of them.

But the abbots and bishops controlled the wealth not the brothers working the fields and vineyards.
The church's role in English history is a study all in itself.

[kenneal - lagger]

The root cause is our addiction to growth compounded, as I said above, by human greed and the desire of a few, by no means all, ....
...

Really Ken? Only a few? How many do you know that have taken vows of poverty and live like monks or hermits?
Granted only a few are the likes of Bill Gates but that is not due to a lack of wishing or a lack of trying.

Maybe The US is different from the UK and Europe. Yes, we like to be comfortable but that is a lot different to the Kleptocracy running the joint. My friends are happy with the comparative wealth that they enjoy.

[vtsnowedin]

The root cause is our addiction to growth compounded, as I said above, by human greed and the desire of a few, by no means all, ....
...

Really Ken? Only a few? How many do you know that have taken vows of poverty and live like monks or hermits?
Granted only a few are the likes of Bill Gates but that is not due to a lack of wishing or a lack of trying.

Maybe The US is different from the UK and Europe. Yes, we like to be comfortable but that is a lot different to the Kleptocracy running the joint. My friends are happy with the comparative wealth that they enjoy.

I suppose you can think that in a time of plenty but let shortages become the norm and you will find that those that preached the most about sharing will be the first to pocket your share of the food.

[kenneal - lagger]

Nobody preaches to me about sharing. It's probably me who does the preaching, as you might have noticed!!

[RenewableCandy]

I think there's a qualitative difference between 'those who just want to be comfortable' - probably most people - and 'those who can't stop wanting to acquire <insert item here e.g. wealth, status, sex etc>'.

Many psychology experts would call the latter 'sociopaths' or 'addicts' & the rest of us 'normal' (ish ) Have a read of 'Affluenza' by that bloke who advised Cameron on Quality Of Life issues (in other words, hardly a sandal-wearing hippie).

In a separate issue, BOTH groups of people would fight for resources if starvation were the alternative. But that is no more 'normal human nature' than it is the 'nature' of a plant to wilt. The plant only wilts when it's short of something. Normal people only fight to the death when they've nowt to lose (or they're drugged - legaly or otherwise).

[vtsnowedin]

I think ...
...

In a separate issue, BOTH groups of people would fight for resources if starvation were the alternative. But that is no more 'normal human nature' than it is the 'nature' of a plant to wilt. The plant only wilts when it's short of something. Normal people only fight to the death when they've nowt to lose (or they're drugged - legally or otherwise).

Correct and unfortunately there are numerous groups of people that are at "nothing to lose" with more joining them every month.

[mikepepler]

Jem Bendell has published a paper over the summer setting all this out in more detail. There's a blog post on it here, with a link to the paper:
https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/0 ... daptation/

There's two follow-up posts, first on barriers to dialogue on deep adaptation:
https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/0 ... daptation/

and then on responses after acceptance:
https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/0 ... -collapse/

On a related note, another interesting paper has come out recently:
https://bios.fi/bios-governance_of_econ ... sition.pdf

I've just started reading it, but there's a shorter summary here:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... ent-demise