Future histories, and hope
Note: this is the follow-up to a previous letter on optimism and climate change.
On April, 19 2018, at 12:52 Timotej wrote:
But I cant help to think your pessimistic view stems from a deeper distrust in humanity in general.
Thanks for another great suggestion. You’re helping me write. :)
I suppose that’s true. Due to the way most humans have treated me most of my life, I tend to be less biased against favoring human beings. I’ve known we are unlikely to sustain ourselves since I was about 8 years.
But by now, I truly love and care about humanity, which gives the collective and unnessary suicide of my species a very bitter aftertaste.
I know for a fact that children can be monsters (I was not only on the receiving side), under the right pretence. If even children can act like monsters - normal children, not sociopaths - then surely adults can. Same mammalian group brain.
Context is the key here, the overall modifying factor to our behaviour. Given the right context, the most bitter isolated person can flourish into a warm-hearted beautiful being, within hours. Given several days, or weeks, in such a healing context could allow for a more sustained healing, one that might spread itself.
It is part of my focus and essential to my desires that contexts like this, environments that incentivize and promote loving and sharing, compassion, co-existence, be created and to be part of them.
I would not believe this if I had not experienced it, first hand, several times, in different environments and situations. I’ve also seen it switch from a brighter, open to a closed and darker outlook and vice versa; these are metastable resonant (social) states that can oscillate back and forth.
I’ve often felt that it is our day-to-day lives, our jobs, our economic situations, together with limiting social norms and believes about the self and humanity that are the real culprit here, the decisive factor. It is precisely (but not exclusively) this which I think any ‘healthy’ community should attain; freedom from the labour-wage relationship, newly defined social norms and rituals embedded in the story of a connected self and the economic freedom to join or leave the community.
However, there is a big discrepancy between the aforementioned, utopic, dream and the lives of most people. In cities, due to inflated house prices and related strong sense of private ownership of land and dwellings, most people do not have the freedom to leave their (often senseless and soon to be automated automated) jobs, their houses or their communities. In ruralities, modern farming and forestry has forced farmers to scale up and lower their margins, enabled by credits. Because their margins are diminishing with their yields, they are forced to degrade their own land with ever more intense extraction of resources while the time and monetary investments needed to switch to regenerative, sustainable methods are unavailable.
The overall sense, which pervades through all levels of society, from the rich to the poor, is that of scarcity; we have constructed an economic system poised on an ever expanding monetary realm, but the underlying physical, human and natural resource bases are diminishing as they are exploited. A focus on the short-term is incentivized by the rents payable together with refinancing requirements of debts that span timescales that a mismatch with nature’s regenerative potential.
In short, the challenge here is to translate profits on long (80-120y) and medium (15-80y) to short (2-15y) timescales, when working bottom-up, or to simply change the timescales at which financing is provided to aim for profits at the longest possible scale.
I, personally, deem the latter option most unlikely, although I do think that would be the most effective way to change our society in the most sensible and efficient way. It would require banks to completely overhaul their strategies, which again would force people away from the short-term ‘scarcity mindset’ to dreaming about, realistically achievable, abundance and regeneration.
As I am yet to be surprised by fundamental changes in the structure of our financial industries, forced or spontaneous, my angle is the bottom-up solution. Where groups of people create cooperative, regenerative, structures and financial instruments, parallel and connected to, the existing (financial) infrastructure. Whereas the long-term yields of existing structures tend to decline, those of regenerative structures keeps rising over time. Note that the difference can be very small as this accumulates over time.
This way, slowly but surely, the regenerative cultures will outlast and outperform the destructive ones, in terms of resources, energy and quality of life, which will make it an attractive option for those living within the current, degrading, system.
But be aware that, due to cultural, social and institutional momentum, especially developed countries might have a hard time allowing these regenerative structures to arrive. We are currently living in a very unsustainable comfort that we are very reluctant to give up. Even as many people in many countries will fall below this Western standard of living, possibly degrading all the way down to the poverty line, many tend to hold on to the ‘American dream’; ‘making it big time’, or possibly the centralized socialist ‘the state provides enough for everyone’.
These are the stories our societies still believe in, and it is these stories that need to be replaced. I am working on a better story or, at least, a more imaginative one. One that aligns with the limitations, the border conditions, set forth by climate and systems science. One that aligns with human and natural grace, and dignity.
But it will be a difficult story; the Free Ones, the heroes of this story, will have difficulties to overcome. Vested interests, the rich, living the nightmare of scarcity, will feel that the reclamation of their ‘rightful’ property, the lands, the houses, the money, is an assault on their ‘fragile’ sustenance, their freedom, as soon as larger movements are starting to form.
My best guess would be, to stay under the radar. Implementing a cultural virus, growing communities horizontally, decentrally. Each one connected to the next, all the way to a concentration sufficient for most people to know 1 or 2 friends living ‘outside the system’. That would be only several percents, at most (whereas it’s about 0.01% right now), but it would be sufficient.
As the dominant pattern in our society, the complete colonisation of our environment, will naturally degrade under the weight of the (material, energy, information) costs of its own sustenance, becoming ever more detrimental to basic freedoms as inequality grows manyfold, people are incentivized to grow previously marginalized alternatives.
Where, even though their may not be ‘enough’ food, people take care of each other. The weak are protected and there will be a dialogue with our environments.
Surely, this is just but one of many alternative ‘future histories’. And, as bright as it might sound, this ‘slow collapse’ scenario involves a great deal of dying, suffering, migration, degradation and poverty. Literally, hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move. Urbanities, especially megapolises, will experience immense resource stresses due to their high population density with regards to the solar surfaces they are exposed to.
Then, we should also allow the possibilities of other scenario’s, potentially in parallel. Solar energy is about to become cheaper than oil, which some say that together with a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, would (temporarily) solve our energy problems, allowing up to remain in a growth pattern until we’re forced to become an interplanetary society. Personally, I think these dreams are far-fetched, but some powerful voices adhere to them. But, as with my vision, part of them might turn out to be true.
Lastly, there is a darker vision and I have, sadly, not been able to shake it off. It is one where a centralized police state is losing over raging plunderers and militants. Where violent gangs rape and plunder the countryside, where no one is safe, while our planet is scavenged until the last resources are used up. It’s this scenario I often find myself confronted with; so what, if I live in a peaceful community, if there’s men with guns, will I protect my kids?
Anyways, I hope you appreciate my reflection. Consider it an invitation to dream with me.
