Our changing world

We are such a successful animal. Yet we have no evolutionary off button. I'll post Cherfurka's comments from a blog he participates in - below if you want more depth. We evolved to expand, use resources, reproduce and acquire more for ours - our family, our children, our tribe, our region. More, more, more. No off switch.

In requiem, perhaps we might say that we are damn creative inhabitants of this beautiful planet, and we never met a predator that we couldn't outwit. We are the beautiful, natural outcome of what we had to be to survive. However we are hitting the wall. I've been saying it for three years. I called the housing bubble, peak oil (Bush talked about peak oil yesterday!), and the beginning of the inflation/deflation destruction of jobs, suburbia, and the automobile. But others called that long before me. How odd how few people listen to simple logic, but if you read Chefurka below you'll see that the brain up top does not really call the shots. We are the scorpion, it is our nature.

You've heard this, but just in case you have not. A turtle and a scorpion are on one side of a river and both wish to get to the other side. The turtle prepares to swim but the scorpion interrupts and asks to cross on his back. The turtle says, but you will sting me and kill me. The scorpion replies - logically - no I won't for I would drown too. So the turtle agrees and they head off with the turtle swimming and the scorpion riding high and dry on his the top of his shell.

Half way across the scorpion stings the turtle in the back of the head. The turtle cries, oh my, why did you do that, now we both will die? The scorpion shrugs - in a scorpion shrugging way - and says, what do you expect, I'm a scorpion.

We are the scorpion. The planet is the turtle. We have too many people, resources are dwindling and that is the scorpions poison to capitalism. There must always be more resources, more buyers, more labor and expanding markets. We have peaked oil, buyers are finally understanding the coming collapse of the financial markets and they are not buying. Businesses are seeing the writing on the wall of the future and are cutting back. Everyone is doing the tighten up. Meanwhile the 6.5 billion of us continue to increase. Why, because it is our nature.

Doomy gloomy gus, why does he write this? To wake you the fuck up. While we can't save the current system, I and others believe that we can give a cockroach competition. In the die off, we will loose 5 billion people or more, and that will straggle out over 70 years or so, however we will not all die.

Today, right now, forget about society, philosophy, your beliefs, your religion, who is running for president, and shrink. Shrink your expenses faster than your neighbors. Shrink your desire for the effluent affluence of society. Start a garden. While you have dollars convert them into stable assets. Do it before all your neighbors (hurry, they started, those of the middle class who will survive, doing it a decade ago). Do you have family, friends, loved ones with varying skills and assets? Weld them into a single group. Create a tribe of mutual support. These are your advantages over your neighbor. Make no mistake, in the competition for dwindling resources, water, oil, gas, air, fertilizer, safety, every person outside your tribe is your competition.

Don't think that wealth without power will survive long. Every person in this matrix of our capitalistic society is caught in their own fragile niche. The one who has wealth in the bank, the market, bonds, treasury notes, they are also at risk for asset loss. These are not real assets but paper backed by the desire of others to buy them at a specific price. These wealthier folks often are less capable of surviving individually, but they too have the same option as you, the formation of tribe, plus they can convert their paper assets to real assets that will survive the dollar destruction that comes.

So chickies, see to yourselves, see to your family, see to your tribe. Perhaps you might be one of the lines that persists through the next seventy years. I know, there will be a huge measure of luck that preparation will not help. But you know, shrinking down, preparation, they are also elements of your evolutionary survival. Peoples who gathered grain gathered enough for winter, or they died. Built into the scorpion part of you is an unmitigated bastard (modern sheeply view) of enormous self preservation. I suggest, that the next six months will be a time of enormous jerking strains and starts that will rip the fabric of this society. Too many parts of the perfect storm abound, and no matter who gets elected you're not going to find enough oil, natural gas or Tesla mystical energy from the Van Allen belts to stop what is already running downhill. Stop arguing, shut off your TV, and start shrinking. Get rid of stupid unsupportable non-asset assets, and shrink into the self reliant yet interconnected tribe who will go forward through this mess as participants, not victims in what comes. No one is going to get through easy, but many will not get through at all.

If indeed we are the scorpion, make peace with that, and use your scorpion powers to help you and your tribe survive. All bow to Bernake, for he and his are pallbearers to capitalism's last gasp. Fuck.

Below is a snippet from Chefurka's post:

"When most people look around the world today they see a set of problems. they see energy/technology problems. They see ecological/environmental problems. They see economic problems. If they are slightly deeper thinkers, they may see population problems. I believe they
are all suffering from vision problems.

What most people see as "technological problems" are more correctly seen as the set of symptoms of the real underlying problem, symptoms that are that are manifesting themselves in the technological arena.

In the same sense, what people are interpreting as "ecological problems" are the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the world's ecology. And what people are interpreting as "economic problems" are merely the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the world's economy.

The underlying problem is the same in all three cases. *Humanity is an overly successful species with no effective predators, the ability to manipulate its environment on a planetary scale, and the perception that it is apart from that environment.*

I actually disagree with the spreading perception that the core environmental problem is human population growth. I used to think it was, but I now think population growth is just another symptom of the problem stated above. You can prove this to yourself with a simple thought
experiment. Imagine that we stabilized our population tomorrow, at our current 6.6 billion people. Would that fix the problems of resource depletion, ecological devastation and the economic instability caused by our insistence on continual material growth? I maintain it wouldn't, because those problems are still worsening where populations have already
stabilized, or are even in outright decline.

Addressing any one of the problems areas - energy/technological, ecological, economic or population - would still leave us with problems in the other three. We can (and will) tinker around in each of these areas, because that's our Buddha-nature - human beings are innate tinkerers. We will do things to ease the situation in each of those symptom domains. But
none of that tinkering addresses the fundamental problem, which I describe as follows:

*Humanity appears to have evolved without a crucial internal self-restraint mechanism. That happened because, like every other species, those restraints were readily available within the environment - mainly resource scarcity, predation and disease. Because those external restraints were available, selection didn't endow us with internal restraints because they weren't needed. In fact, during our early time as a species, an internal self-restraint mechanism acting in addition to the external restraints would have been counter-productive, and would have been actively selected out of our makeup.

However, as we developed the intellectual ability to circumvent those external restraints - through extinguishing all large predators, and developing agriculture, mining and medicine - we outfoxed ourselves. Because in the absence of either internal or external restraints we are left with no effective way to reign in our genetic urge for expansion. All that remains
is our intellectual capacity to foresee outcomes and to regulate our behaviour through reason. As far as I can tell, reason is not a strong enough counterbalance to our innate behavioural tendencies. The evidence of this is no further away than the $2500 Tata.*

So I hold out no hope whatever that our tinkering will solve the "real" dilemma of humanity. We are behaving exactly as our evolution intended, and its unlikely that we will stop. What we need to do is to figure out ways in which our feeble reason can create the conditions for the continued survival of our species and perhaps some of our civilization, despite both our unconstrained, innate urge to grow and our glorious but tragic ability to reason. These are the aspects of our nature that are at the root of all our troubles, and we will need to be enormously cunning to outmaneuver them.

Paul Chefurka