Google Forms GoogleEnergy™

Ariel Schwartz at FastCompany has the story.

Funny thing is, here is a slide I showed during a talk I gave at a conference in Manhattan in April of 2006. The title of the conference was "Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma." Look at the second item on the right. Uncanny, is it not? (I believe it is sometimes acceptable to tootle your own horn, provided you do it softly, without startling any of the neighbors.)

I said: A private sector solution is not impossible; just very, very unlikely. Certain Soviet state enterprises were basically states within states. They controlled what amounted to an entire economic system, and could go on even without the larger economy. They kept to this arrangement even after they were privatized. They drove Western management consultants mad, with their endless kindergartens, retirement homes, laundries, and free clinics. These weren't part of their core competency, you see. They needed to divest and to streamline their operations. The Western management gurus overlooked the most important thing: the core competency of these enterprises lay in their ability to survive economic collapse. Maybe the young geniuses at Google can wrap their heads around this one, but I doubt that their stockholders will.

Well, it appears that I have been wrong, for once. Is it a realistic plan after all? I am riddled with self-doubt, you see. My crystal ball is all scuffed up.

Perhaps some of you would want to venture a guess on which one will come next. If so, please make a wager. Will it be GoogleSchools™, or will it be GoogleHealth™? Do you believe in a bright future... for Google? (Google employees and their families are not allowed to participate.)

[Update: It's GoogleMoney. Alas, it wasn't even on my list. None of us here called it. Google moves in mysterious ways.]

Thinking in Straight Lines

Let’s face it, we, the civilized, educated, enlightened part of humanity like things to be straight. Let primitive tribesmen live in picturesque and practical round huts—we require abstract boxes of steel and concrete clad in plate glass, with plenty of nice straight lines, true vertical and horizontal planar surfaces and lots of ninety-degree angles to please the eye. Let these tribesmen spend their days meandering up and down picturesque winding paths laid down by grazing animals—when we build a road, we take a map and apply a ruler to it, and anything that’s in the way of that ruler, picturesque or not, must be dynamited and bulldozed because everyone knows that traveling in straight lines is more efficient.

This is good enough for most of us, and so we have come to regard straight lines as natural. In fact, in our world there are just two types of natural phenomena that give rise to straight lines: objects drop or hang down in straight vertical lines, and light beams travel in straight lines; beyond plumb lines and lines of sight everything is either a curve or a squiggle. But since most of our environment is artificial—and crammed full of straight lines and flat horizontal and vertical surfaces—we hardly ever have to confront this fact. Of course, the more scientifically astute among us know that straight lines are but a convenient fiction. We start with a conceptual framework of space that consists of x, y and z axes, and proceed to coerce our observations to fit this framework until the mismatch becomes too obvious to ignore, as with objects dropped from orbit, or with light from far-away galaxies that’s so warped by nearby galaxies that the image looks like a smear.

But the fiction is indeed very convenient. To start with, all straight lines are interchangeable and compatible. When we build, we tend to put things either on top of or next to other things, and if they involve straight lines, then no intricate fitting is involved—we can just slap it together any which way and efficiently move on to our next box-building exercise. When we go to a lumberyard, what we buy is not so much wood as straight lines cut through wood. Trees know a lot more than we do about constructing maximally efficient structures out of wood, but we like straight lines, and so we cut through the strongest part of the tree—the concentric rings of wood that make up the trunk—for the sake of making a perfectly straight stick. We could build beautiful, strong, long-lasting structures using round timbers grown to order (as some of us do) but generally we don’t because we are mentally lazy, always in too much of a hurry, and have made a fetish of straight lines.

Quite unsurprisingly, our preference for straight lines carries over into the way we think about relationships between things—the mental models we construct of our world. For instance, we consider it a matter of moral rectitude and straight dealing that the price be linearly proportional to the amount of stuff we get: if you pay twice as much, you should get twice as many potatoes. Quantity discounts are acceptable and sometimes expected, but pricing on a curve is generally seen as underhanded. We mistrust curves. Stepwise functions are fine, though, because they are made up of straight line segments. We can put up with having tax brackets, but try taxing people based on a nonlinear formula, and there is sure to be a tax revolt. Were the potato market a product of biological evolution rather than of human artifice, it would perhaps work like this: the price would be some nonlinear function that’s directly proportional to the customer’s net worth, and the number of potatoes dispensed would be some nonlinear function that’s inversely proportional to his net girth. Place your moneybags on one sliding scale, your flab-bags on the other, and some potatoes come out. Such a natural regulatory mechanism would prevent fat, rich gluttons from out-eating the rest of us, but it cannot be, for we have a very strong cultural preference for a simple linear relationship between price and quantity.

Straight lines are popular with grocers and their customers, but nobody loves a straight-edge more than the technocrat. Real-world data generally look like a collection of unique artifacts described by a multitude of qualitatively dissimilar properties and inferred relationships, all fluctuating unpredictably over time in a way that resists the direct application of the straight-edge. Therefore, the first step is to quantify the properties and, if at all possible, ignore the relationships. The next step is to choose just two parameters and to plot these artifacts as points on a piece of graph paper. Then, finally, a technocrat can grab a straight-edge, slap it down on the piece of paper, move it around a bit to find what looks like a good fit, and draw a straight line. Voilà: a linear relationship between two complex phenomena has been found, which can now be treated as real and objective—something that can be shared with one’s colleagues and be used as a basis for setting policy—because it involves a straight line which tells that one thing is proportional to some other thing, so that we know what result to expect when we perturb one or the other.

Straight lines are popular with engineers as well. Engineers work hard to design linear, time-invariant systems in which the output is directly proportional to the input any time you like. To them, deviations from linear behavior are defects. They are to us as well: we can hear it if the audio amplifier has nonlinear effects because it distorts the sound, and we can see it if the optics distorts the image. We can tell a straight line from a crooked one without any tools. But the mathematical tools which engineers use when they design these linear time-invariant systems are particularly good, as mathematical tools go. Mathematics can be quite fun as a sort of advanced parlor game for philosophers, but most math is rather problematic from an engineer’s point of view. You can describe just about anything using a set of differential equations, but most of the interesting phenomena—the behavior of an airfoil in an airstream, for instance, or the behavior of high-temperature gases in a combustion chamber—produce equations that can’t be solved analytically, and can only be approached using numerical methods, using a computer. A mathematical model is constructed, and random numbers are thrown at it to see what comes out. But linear time-invariant systems are described using a singularly well-behaved class of differential equations which do have closed-form, analytical solutions that directly provide answers to design questions, and so engineering students are drilled in them ad naseam and then go on to design and build all kinds of machinery that behaves as linearly as possible, from humble volume knobs to complex aircraft control surfaces. In turn, this well-behaved, predictable machinery allows us to achieve linear effects within the economy: build more stuff—get proportionally more money; spend more money—get proportionally more stuff. But, just as one might suspect, this only works up to a point.

Let us recall: straight lines are but a convenient fiction. There is no physical analogue of a mathematical straight line that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity. The best we can do is use all of our artifice to create relatively short straight line segments. Truth be told, the engineers can’t create linear systems; they can only create systems that exhibit linear behavior in their linear region. Outside of that region, nature does what it always does: make crazy curves and squiggles and generally behave in random and unpredictable ways. An example of what happens when we exceed the limits of the linear region from our everyday experience is the phenomenon of overloading an audio amplifier. The resulting effect is called clipping, and it sounds like a particularly unpleasant, harsh, grating noise. There are only two solutions: turn down the volume (return to the linear region), or get a more powerful amplifier.

In the economic realm, the effects of exceeding the limits of the linear region can be even more unpleasant. While within that region, building more houses generates more wealth, but just outside of that region strange things begin to happen rather quickly: house prices crash, mortgages go bad, and building any more houses becomes a singularly bad idea. In the linear region, having more money makes you richer, in the sense of being able to buy more stuff, but outside of that region one is forced to realize that since most money has been loaned into existence, it is in fact composed of debt, and once this debt goes bad, no matter how good your net worth looks on paper you are still facing destitution, greatly exacerbated by the fact that you are out of practice when it comes to being poor. In the linear region, investing more money in energy production produces more energy, but just outside that region it produces less energy, and may also inadvertently destroy entire industries and ecosystems.

If linearity is a fiction that is only useful up to a point, then what about time-invariance? Clearly, it too must have its limits. Stepping on the accelerator may produce the same acceleration every time, but the amount of fuel in the tank decreases monotonically until there is none left. When it comes to more complex, dynamic systems—industries, economies, societies—they may continue to respond to external stimuli in a linear and time-invariant manner up to a point, but behind this stable façade their capabilities erode, their resources dwindle, their complexity increases, and beyond a certain point an entirely different process begins: the process of collapse. Such systems generally do not become smaller, spontaneously become less complex or reduce their resource use while continuing to respond to external stimuli in a controlled, linear manner.

But so strong and so deeply ingrained is our habit of thinking in straight lines that often we cannot imagine that we can ever leave the linear region, or, once we do, that we have done so, even when the evidence is staring us in the face. Forensic analyses of airplane crashes have revealed that sometimes, as his last act, the pilot ripped the control console off the cockpit floor—an act that requires superhuman strength—so hard was he pulling back on the yoke to bring up the airplane’s nose. I am sure that there are plenty of pilots—in all walks of life—who will prefer to crash, gripping the controls with all their might, gaze fixed on the distant, irrelevant or fictional horizon, than to push the eject button. Their entire life’s experience has been confined to the linear region, and so they cannot imagine that it can ever end.

One particularly significant example of this thinking is the belief in Peak Oil, generally expressed as the idea that global oil production already has or will soon reach an all-time peak, and will then gradually decrease over a time span of several decades. Oil depletion is being modeled as a linear function of oil production: a few percent a year, holding more or less steady from one year to the next. At the same time, the use of oil by industrialized societies is often quite usefully characterized as an addiction. Let us exercise this metaphor a bit and see where it takes us. Suppose you have a junkie who has an ever-increasing heroin habit and who has to go out and hustle harder and harder to score his next fix. Now, suppose global heroin production peaks, prices go up, supply dwindles, and our junkie has to start cutting the dose. Not too far along what you then have is a sick junkie, in withdrawal, who cannot go out and hustle for his next fix. And very soon after that you have a collapse of the heroin market because the junkies have all been forced to kick the habit to one extent or another. This disruption of the heroin market, even if temporary, causes heroin production to decrease even faster, production costs and associated risks to go up, and so forth. Beyond a certain point, the heroin market would no longer be characterized as a linear, time-invariant system where the more you pay the more of it you get any time you like, because there would be so little of it around.

Similarly with oil. Right after Hurricane Katrina there was some disruption of gasoline supplies in some of the southern US states. People have written to me to tell me that the result was instant mayhem: society at all levels swiftly stopped functioning. The shortage was temporary and was quickly forgotten, but were it a long-term, systemic shortage, we would no doubt observe all the usual effects: much extra fuel evaporated from topping off fuel tanks and burned from driving around with a full tank and full jerrycans in the trunk, much fuel wasted from driving around looking for gasoline and from idling in long lines at filling stations, a lot of siphoning of gas from tanks and motorists left stranded as a result, a lot of people unable to get to work, and, shortly after that, hoarding, looting and rioting, commerce at a standstill, use of federal troops to restore public order, curfews and limitations on all travel, bank holidays and a balance of payments crisis, and, finally, the general inability to pay for further oil production or imports. All of these disruptions cause oil production to fall even faster, along with all other economic activity, until there is simply not that much demand for the stuff. As much of the global oil industry is idled, drilling rigs, refineries and pipelines fall into disuse and become inoperable. Instead of a nice few-percent-a-year gradual decline, we would have what Douglas Adams would have described as a “spontaneous existence failure.”

I am sure that some people would like me to whip out my straight-edge, plot some straight lines and make some projections: What is my price forecast? What production numbers are we talking about, ten or twenty years out? Well, that to me feels like a complete waste of time. I’d rather spend time learning how to train trees for round timber construction. The future is certain to be nonlinear, but I am quite sure that there will be trees in it. The reason I bring this up is that there are a few of pilots out there who I hope will have the presence of mind to push the eject button instead of clutching at the controls with their eyes locked on the artificial horizon.

C-Realm Podcast: Technogenic Catastrophe

"If you translate "industrial accident" into Russian and then back into English, you're likely to end up with "technogenic catastrophe." Might the Gulf Oil Spill be the American Chernobyl? KMO welcomes Dmitry Orlov back to the podcast to examine these questions and to explain why collapse is still the optimistic scenario, why it isn't necessary or even helpful for his message to find a mainstream audience, and why working for reform of the current political establishment is not a credible or worthwhile activity. Music by Tibet2Timbuk2."

US Swaps Russian Spies for... Russian Spies

A couple of weeks ago I was amused to see a large hammer and sickle on the cover of the local subway rag: Spy scandal! Cold war is back on! Happy days are here again!

The truth, of course, is much less amusing. The FBI, after years and years of assiduous investigation, nailed a handful of Russians for failing to register as foreign agents. (Reminds me, got to get my fishing license renewed.) These Russians have been living boring suburban American lives under assumed Anglo names trying to infiltrate posh cocktail parties. They never succeeded. Yawn.

But eventually the story gets interesting when Washington agrees to a spy swap with Moscow, exchanging these hapless nobodies with... some actual Russian spies—Russians who have been caught spying for the US and have been cooling their heels in Russian jails.

Out with the party crashers, in with some real honest-to-goodness traitors, who will now be hosted in the US at taxpayer expense. Maybe they can do some spying for Moscow now. Being traitors, they should have zero moral qualms. Be sure to look for them at forthcoming cocktail parties.

Update: The bulk of comments submitted for this post attest to two salient facts:

1. Many Americans have a knee-jerk hatred of Russia—not surprising, since this is what American mass media has been trying to instill in many generations of them. Loyal Americans establish their loyalty by bad-mouthing people in other countries. Since this is largely a display of ignorance, it is not even threatening—just pathetic.

2. More interestingly, many Americans no longer even understand the concepts of loyalty and treason—again, not surprising, since for a few generations now they have been ruled by traitors, whose routine acts of betrayal are designed to benefit just about anyone—from Israeli arms smugglers to Afghani heroin dealers—except the people who supposedly elect them to office.

Since most of my readers apparently feel no compulsion to trash-talk Russia or to demonstrate their ignorance of the concept of treason—or to submit comments—I am killing the comments for this post.

Checkmate

In all of the descriptions of perilous situations that I have studied, arising during adventures on the high seas or in the high mountains, or during armed conflict, a single mistake rarely proves fatal. More often than not, death comes as a result of a sequence of bad choices which reinforce each other. These choices may not appear bad at the time—but they certainly do in retrospect! The end result is a situation in which no further steps can be taken that would not be either harmful or futile. This is the essence of checkmate: no moves left. At that point, none of the previous moves can be undone. Nor do they even exist, really: they have gone off to an imaginary universe populated by the regretful ghosts of those who didn't make it.

As one should expect from a natural phenomenon, failure is fractal—observable at every scale. The same pattern of maladaptive strategy leading to untimely demise constantly replays itself at the level of viruses and bacteria, and all the way to individual plants and animals, populations, societies, countries and civilizations. Nature moves forward by canceling its unsuccessful experiments, which far outnumber its successes. Most people have come to terms with the theory of natural selection, and can understand individual and group failure. But over the last few decades—quite recently, in fact—it has become unacceptable to speak of accepting the failure of very large corporations, societies and countries as a terminal state. They are always considered to be in need of bail-out, reorganization, aid, reform, reconstruction, development and so forth. Perpetual degradation and decay followed by a headlong plunge into merciful oblivion is simply not on offer. Haiti will one day be prosperous, Somalia a model democracy, and perhaps even low-lying coastal and island nations can have a bright though wet future, provided the people there are fitted with snorkels to help them cope with rising ocean levels. When attempting to come to terms with the regularly observable demise of civilizations, and the forthcoming demise of this one, our failure to cope is complete: ancient pagan archetypes take over our thinking, our unconscious mind takes over, and we are transported to a realm of second-rate fantasy films. All reasonable people agree that the future is either Mad Max or Waterworld; take your pick, end of discussion.

The concept of strategy, and of games of strategy, is a useful one, although when applying it to serious matters (instead of childish distractions like sports) our thinking tends to be distorted by the bad habits that sports instill in us. We tend to think of games as enjoyable learning experiences that teach us to play better the next time. The idea that there always has to be the next time is insidious. The vast majority of the games we can observe being played out, both in nature and in society, are played specifically to determine whether there should be a next time. "But I have learned my lessons and the next time we play I will win!" says the defeated champion. "That won't be necessary," says Death. "We must hurry. There is a horny old man who's dying to meet you. He'll be your personal trainer for the rest of eternity." But even this ageless little narrative has a flaw, for Death is rarely in much of a hurry, and the leading edge of eternity is quite fuzzy. Defeat overlaps decay, which overlaps demise. We continue playing far beyond the point at which our defeat would have become clear to us in retrospect. In the meantime, we come to accept our personal trainer as the devil that we know, and might even delude ourselves into thinking that we are winning.

It is a serious matter that much of life has been recast in terms of sport. We are all supposed to be good sports, team players, when we fail we pick ourselves up and try again, or fall into a safety net. When we get into trouble we can always call for rescue. When someone dies, it is always the result of an accident, never the inevitable result of bad judgment. People who fail repeatedly yet always try again are lauded for their persistence, never mind that they are serial failures. This isn't necessarily bad; people should and do safeguard each other. What's worse is that the higher in society one goes, the more dilute the consequences of failure tend to become, until we rise up to those exalted places whose existence is safeguarded by the magic incantation "too big to fail." This incantation is quite effective: many people are hypnotized by it. It prevents them from seeing something quite obvious: when serial failures are continually rescued, this allows them to bloat up until they are too large for the rescuers to deal with, at which point they become too big to not fail. When any one of them can no longer be rescued, the result is a cascaded failure that overwhelms the rest, and failure becomes crippling. Past that point, nobody gets to try much of anything ever again: society has checkmated itself.

What happens after that point bears a striking resemblance to what came before. After all, there were many insoluble problems before, and many degenerative cultural trends could be observed. It's just that there are more of them afterward, and they are more severe, but there may not be an obvious qualitative difference. It may not be immediately apparent that checkmate has arrived, and the specific point in time can become visible only in retrospect, if at all. Emergencies come and go, and people get used to the fact that the beaches are black and sometimes catch fire and burn for weeks, or that there is a ravine running through the center of town where the riverfront used to be, or that electricity is only on for a couple of hours a day. Dogs and children turn feral, but nobody remembers when that started happening, so everyone assumes that that's the way it's always been. Nor does anyone remember when it became fashionable to tattoo corporate logos on one's scalp, or to proudly display one's naked buttocks in public. An expatriate who leaves and later comes back might think that this now is a completely different country, but those who stay would be at pains to detect the difference because for them changes were too slow to rise above the threshold of perception.

The population can dwindle quite rapidly, but this too is often imperceptible. Large swaths of the landscape become depopulated, but that is not noticed by anyone because nobody goes there any more. When births exceed deaths, population increases exponentially. When deaths exceed births, population declines exponentially. There are always some maternities, and there are always some funerals; the change in the ratio of the two is not something that can be directly perceived. Societal extinction doesn't make any noise when it finally happens. Survivors simply move on. Non-survivors might as well have not existed, and the more gullible survivors come to believe the extravagant ruins they left behind to have been the work of extraterrestrials.

How does a society go about checkmating itself? There is no shortage of real-world examples, but real life is complicated, so here is a simple allegory. Let's suppose that there is a tribe called the Merkanoids, which remains quite ordinary for most of its history, but which at some point undergoes a strange cultural mutation. An accidental synergy between atmospheric electricity and chemicals in the water produces a strange effect on their minds that causes them to decamp from the towns and villages wherein they had hitherto happily dwelt, and take up residence in little huts scattered throughout the surrounding pasture, fields and woods. They then proceed to move around and switch huts a lot, until few of them know or trust their neighbors. This makes them feel rather unsafe, and the way the Merkanoids decide to make themselves feel safer is by burying land mines about their property and posting signs that read "No trespassing! Land mines!"

This makes them feel a whole lot safer while in fact making them much less so: the social predators among them become reasonably good at avoiding land mines, while the rest of the population generally does not, producing a large subclass of people whose legs have been blown off. These, being relatively immobile and defenseless, present an even more desirable target to the social predators, and naturally compensate by acquiring more and bigger land mines. This cycle repeats a few times, until two-legged people become the minority. Since people who are missing a lower limb or two are somewhat less productive than two-legged ones, in due course the Merkanoid economy can no longer produce the surplus necessary to invest in anything beyond more land mines (which they now find it cheaper to import from China on credit than to manufacture themselves). As debt service swallows up more and more of the Merkanoids income, their disposable income plummets. As a consequence, crutches, wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs became luxury items which fewer and fewer of them can afford. Without these devices the ever more numerous legless people can no longer move around, making it more difficult for them to remain productive members of the Merkanoid economy, causing economic output to plunge even faster.

When this vicious cycle becomes too obvious for any half-intelligent Merkanoid to ignore, a reform movement springs up. Activists organize community de-mining activities and promote the idea of an annual "land mine-free week." Entrepreneurs work to develop "green mines" which stun people instead of maiming them, but these come to be regarded as less effective and therefore unsafe. Some political extremists take the radical step of de-mining their own properties. A lot of them then find their huts repeatedly burgled and quietly put the land mines back in. At one point a brilliant Merkanoid visionary has an epiphany and exclaims: "It's not the land-minds that are killing us! It's the huts!" Everyone thinks that he had gone off the deep end: how can anyone not live in one's own private hut? It's the Merkanoid way of life!

In the meantime, small groups of as yet two-legged people begin to band together on the margins of Merkanoid society. Instead of living in widely dispersed huts, they live compactly in tents, moving about the non-mined parts of the landscape. They eschew land mines and defend themselves (and each other) by keeping a sharp look-out at all times, and, if necessary, with pointed sticks. They also spontaneously develop a sort of crazy talk that turns out to be highly disruptive to the mainstream Merkanoid mentality. So disruptive is this effect that Merkanoid society, having no energy to oppose these outside groups, is forced to strenuously deny their existence. In turn, the outsiders happily ignore much of Merkanoid society, patiently waiting for it to fade from view, which, in due course, it does.

I hope that the meaning of my little parable is clear. A society takes a series of bad turns (which may not seem bad at the time). Once that happens, it's all over but for the waiting. The turns are irreversible, and attempting to make a society undo them is futile. In this situation, the only adaptive thing any of us can do is to learn to live as if these turns had never been made in the first place. This, of course, is very difficult and, should you succeed, will make you unpopular, so you should definitely consider the alternative: do nothing. In the timeless words of the I Ching, "Perseverance does not further. No blame."

Lost Leaders

[Update June 14: It is becoming apparent to all good and knowledgeable people that the well bore structure is compromised "down-hole" (or, as I put it here earlier, "there is no oil well—just a large, untidy hole in the sea bottom with hydrocarbons spewing out of it."]

It is embarrassing to be lost. It is even more embarrassing for a leader to be lost. And what's really really embarrassing to all concerned is when national and transnational corporate leaders attempt to tackle a major disaster and are found out to have been issuing marching orders based on the wrong map. Everyone then executes a routine of turning toward each other in shock, frowning while shaking their heads slowly from side to side and looking away in disgust. After that, these leaders might as well limit their public pronouncements to the traditional "Milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner fudge is made." Whatever they say, the universal reaction becomes: "What leaders? We don't have any."

Getting lost can be traumatic for the rest of us too. When we suddenly realize that we don't know where we are, urgent neural messages are exchanged between our prefrontal cortex, which struggles to form a coherent picture of what's happening, our amygdala, whose job is to hold on to a sense of where we are, and our hippocampus, which motivates us to get back to a place we know as quickly as we possibly can. This strange bit of internal wiring explains why humans who are only slightly lost tend to trot off in a random direction and promptly become profoundly lost. After these immediate biochemical reactions have run their course, we go through the usual stages of:

1. denial—"We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next..."
2. anger—"We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!"
3. bargaining—"The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there..."
4. depression—"We'll never get there! We're all going to die out here!" and 
5. acceptance—"We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold."

Some people don't survive, some do; the difference in outcome turns out to have precious little to do with skill or training, and everything to do with motivation—the desire to survive no matter how much pain and discomfort that involves—and the mental flexibility to adjust one's mental map on the fly to fit the new reality, and to reach stage 5 quickly. Those who go on attempting to operate based on an outdated mental map tend to die in utter bewilderment.

Working with an outdated mental map is a big problem for anyone; for a leader, it may very well spell the end of the position of leadership. After the catastrophe at Chernobyl, the Soviet leaders attempted to operate, for as long as possible, with a mental map that included a relatively intact and generally serviceable nuclear reactor called "Chernobyl Energy Block No. 4". "The reactor has been shut down and is being cooled," went the official pronouncements from the Kremlin, "we are pumping in water to cool it." After a while it became known that there is no reactor—just a smoldering, molten hole spewing radioactive smoke—and the coolant water, prodigious quantities of which were indeed pumped in and spilled in its general vicinity. It instantly boiled away into radioactive steam (which drifted downwind and eventually rained out, poisoning even more of the land). The rest of it leaked out, forming radioactive settling ponds and threatening to further leak into and poison the river that flows through Kiev. As you might imagine, that little episode turned out to be just a little bit embarrassing. Anyone who could think started to think: "Following these leaders is not conducive to survival. Let's make our own plans." Gorbachev went on with his usual long-winded blah-blahs, but the milk-milk-lemonade routine would have served him just as well.

More recently, we have been exposed to the spectacle of corporate leaders and public officials attempting to operate, for as long as possible, with a mental map that includes a blown-out but otherwise serviceable deep-water oil well in the Gulf of Mexico variously called "Deepwater Horizon" or "Macondo" or "MC252". A number of unsuccessful attempts have been made to capture the oil and gas that have been escaping from it using at least three different techniques. BP—the well's owner—is an oil company, and so their first reaction was to get and sell that oil no matter what. They tried to fit the well with a "top hat" to get all of the oil, but when their contraption didn't work because it got clogged by methane hydrate crystals they stuck a smaller pipe into the leak, just to get and sell some of the oil, and when that worked it made them happy. But, coming under pressure to do something about all the oil leaking out and poisoning the environment, they finally decided to try shutting down the well by squiring various substances into it. The procedures they've tried, going by idiotic Top Gun names like "junk shot" and "top kill"—have all been to no avail. At some point it becomes clear that there is no oil well—just a large, untidy hole in the sea bottom with hydrocarbons spewing out of it, forming huge surface slicks and underwater plumes of oil that kill all they encounter and eventually wash up on land to continue the damage there, turning the Gulf Coast into a disaster area. Starting in another month or so the toxic soup composed of oily tropical seawater and decomposing coastal vegetation and sea life will be stirred up and driven inland by tropical storms and hurricanes. Gulf Coast oil-grunge will become the de facto new national style: oil-streaked skin and clothing and perhaps a dead pelican for a sunhat.

 When things go horribly wrong, it is natural for us mere mortals to try to obtain a bit of psychological comfort by holding on to familiar images. A person who has totaled his car tends to continue to refer to the twisted wreckage as "my car" instead of "the wreckage of my car." In the case someone's wrecked car, this may be accepted as mere shorthand, but in many other cases this tendency results in people working with an outdated mental map which leads them astray, because the properties of a wreck are quite different from those of an intact object. For example, our lost leaders are continuing to refer to "the financial system" instead of "the wreck of the financial system." If they had the flexibility to make that mental switch, perhaps they wouldn't insist on continuing to pump in more and more public debt, only to watch it spew out again through a tangle of broken pipes so horrific that it defies all understanding, with quite a lot of it mysteriously dribbling into the vaults and pockets of bankers and billionaire investors. It will be interesting to watch their attempts at a financial "top kill" or "junk shot" to plug the ensuing geyser of toxic debt.

It is natural for us to naïvely expect our leaders—be they corporate executives or their increasingly decorative and superfluous adjuncts in government—to be our betters, having been picked for leadership positions by their ability to lead us through difficult and unfamiliar terrain. We expect them to have the mental agility and flexibility to be able to revise their mental maps as the circumstances dictate. We don't expect them to be stupid, and are surprised to find that indeed they are. How is that possible? Mental enfeeblement of the ruling class of a collapsing empire is not without precedent: the British imperial experiment was clearly doomed as early as the end of World War I, but it took until well into World War II for this fact to register in the enfeebled brains of the British ruling class. In his 1941 essay England your England, George Orwell offers the following explanation:

...[T]he British ruling class obviously could not admit that their usefulness of was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate...  Clearly there was only one escape for them—into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though it was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on [a]round them."

And so it is now: as the American empire has been crumbling, its leaders, both corporate and corporatist, were being specially selected for being unable to draw their own conclusions based on their own independent reasoning or on the evidence of their own senses, relying instead on "intelligence" that is second-hand and obsolete. These leaders are now attempting to lead us all on a dream-walk to oblivion.

Back in 2008 I published the prediction that while Chernobyl was rather decisive in putting paid to the Soviet scientific/technological program and in dispelling all remaining trust in the Soviet political establishment, the US program of scientific/technological progress and ruthless exploitation of nature is more likely to suffer a death by a thousand cuts. But if one of these cuts hits an artery early on, a thousand cuts would be overkill. Just as with any wreck, the properties of a radically phlebotomized body politic are rather different from those of a healthy one, or even a sick one—not that our lost leaders could notice something like that! They will no doubt go on going on about money and oil (and the predictable lack thereof), but they might as well be telling us about their milk and lemonade, and please hold the drilling mud. How embarrassing!

An American Chernobyl

[Update June 10: Many people have had this same realization since I published this post. Here is an excellent, detailed summary that details the similarities, with links to resources.]

The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore:

• An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 spewed radioactive waste across Europe

• A recent explosion and sinking of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform is spewing heavy oil into the Gulf of Mexico

These accidents were both quite spectacular. At Chernobyl, the force of the explosion, caused by superheated steam inside the reactor, tossed the 2500-tonne reactor lid 10-14 meters into the air where it twirled like a tossed penny and came to rest back on the wrecked reactor. The cloud of superheated vapor then separated into a large volume of hydrogen gas, which detonated, demolishing the reactor building and adjoining structures. At Deepwater Horizon, a blowout of a recently completed oil well sent an uncontrolled burst of oil and gas, pressurized to over 10,000 psi by the 25000-foot depth of the well, up to the drilling platform, where it detonated, causing a fire. The rig then sank, and came to rest in a heap of wreckage on top of the oil well, which continues to spew at least 200,000 gallons of oil a day. Left unchecked, this would amount to 1.7 million barrels of oil per year, for an indefinite duration. This amount of oil may be enough to kill off or contaminate all marine life within the Gulf of Mexico, to foul the coastline throughout the Gulf and, thanks to the Gulf Stream, through much of the Eastern Seaboard, at least to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and possibly beyond. A few tarballs will probably wash up as far north as Greenland.

The Chernobyl disaster was caused more or less directly by political appointeesm: the people in charge of the reactor control room had no background in nuclear reactor operations or nuclear chemistry, having got their jobs through the Communist Party. They attempted a dangerous experiment, executed it incompetently, and the result was an explosion and a meltdown. The Deepwater Horizon disaster will perhaps be found to have similar causes. BP, which leased and operated Deepwater Horizon, is chaired by one Carl-Henric Svanberg—a man with no experience in the oil industry. The people who serve on the boards of directors of large companies tend to see management as a sort of free-floating skill, unrelated to any specific field or industry, rather similarly to how the Soviet Communist party thought of and tried to use the talents of its cadres. Allegations are already circulating that BP drilled to a depth of 25000 feet while being licensed to drill up to 18000 feet, that safety reviews of technical documents had been bypassed, and that key pieces of safety equipment were not installed in order to contain costs. It will be interesting to see whether the Deepwater Horizon disaster, like the Chernobyl disaster before it, turns out to be the direct result of management decisions made by technical incompetents.

More importantly, the two disasters are analogous in the unprecedented technical, administrative, and political challenges posed by their remediation. In the case of Chernobyl, the technical difficulty stemmed from the need to handle high level radioactive waste. Chunks of nuclear reactor fuel lay scattered around the ruin of the reactor building, and workers who picked them up using shovels and placed them in barrels received a lethal radiation dose in just minutes. To douse the fire still burning within the molten reactor core, bags of sand and boron were dropped into it from helicopters, with lethal consequences for the crews. Eventually, a concrete sarcophagus was constructed around the demolished reactor, sealing it off from the environment. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, the technical difficulty lies with stemming a high-pressure flow of oil, most likely mixed with natural gas, gushing from within the burned, tangled wreck of the drilling platform at a depth of 5000 feet. An effort is currently underway to seal the leak by lowering a 100-ton concrete-and-steel "contraption" onto it from a floating crane and using it to capture and pump out the oil as it leaks out. I think "sarcophagus" sounds better.

The administrative challenge, in the case of Chernobyl, lay in evacuating and resettling large urban and rural populations from areas that were contaminated by the radiation, in preventing contaminated food products from being sold, and in dealing with the medical consequences of the accident, which includes a high incidence of cancer, childhood leukemia and birth defects. The effect of the massive oil spill from Deepwater Horizon is likely to cause massive dislocation within coastal communities, depriving them of their livelihoods from fishing, tourism and recreation. Unless the official efforts to aid this population are uncharacteristically prompt and thorough, their problems will bleed into and poison politics.

The political challenges, in both cases, centered on the inability of the political establishment to acquiesce to the fact that a key source of energy (nuclear power or deep-water oil) relied on technology that was unsafe and prone to catastrophic failure. The Chernobyl disaster caused irreparable damage to the reputation of the nuclear industry and foreclosed any further developments in this area. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is likely to do the same for the oil industry, curtailing any possible expansion of drilling in deep water, where much of the remaining oil is to be found, and perhaps even shutting down the projects that have already started. In turn, this is likely to hasten the onset of the terminal global oil shortage, which the US Department of Energy and the Pentagon have forecast for 2012.

Translate "industrial accident" into Russian and back into English, and what you get is "technogenic catastrophe". This term got a lot of use after the Chernobyl disaster. It is rather more descriptive than the rather flaccid English phrase, and it puts the blame where it ultimately comes to rest in any case: with the technology, and the technologists and politicians who push it. Technology that can and sometimes does fail catastrophically, causing unacceptable levels of environmental devastation, is no good, regardless of how economically necessary it happens to be. It must be shut down. In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we are already hearing that expansion of deep-water drilling is "dead on arrival". This could be the beginning of the end for the huge but dying beast that is the petrochemical industry, or more such accidents may be required for the realization finally to sink in and the cry of "Shut it down!" to be heard.

The energy industry has run out of convenient, high-quality resources to exploit, and is now forced to turn to resources it previously passed over: poor, dirty, difficult, expensive resources such as tar sands, heavy oil, shale, and deep offshore. Under relentless pressure to do more with less, people are likely to try to cut corners wherever possible, and environmental safety is likely to suffer. Before it finally crashes, the huge final effort to wring the last few drops of energy out of a depleted planet will continue to serve up bigger and bigger disasters. Perhaps the gruesome aftermath of this latest accident will cause enough people to proclaim "Enough! Shut it all down!" But if not, there is always the next one.

The Great Unreasoning

Wherever we go, and whatever we do, we find ourselves surrounded by a variety of human and animal noises:

"Woof!"—"Meow!"—"Moo!"—"Baah!"—"Tweet!"—"How about them Red Sox!"

And, naturally, we find ourselves wondering, What are they all saying? What does it all mean? Does it mean anything at all, or is it just a lot of meaningless background noise?

To be sure, sometimes it is just noise. But it seems that while animals use just one or two utterances (bark, growl, whimper) to convey an entire range of meanings, humans use a vast, seemingly infinite array of utterances to convey just one meaning: "Me! Me! Look at me! I am important! My opinions matter!" How is it that animals, with their restricted vocal repertoire, nevertheless manage to convey thoughts such as "Let's all fly south now!" or "Tiger on the prowl! Form an orderly stampede!" while we, with our virtual symphony orchestra of linguistic means at our disposal, never seem to manage anything better than the weak and ineffectual "What I think we should all do is... baah!"

Recently, science has started to shed light on the phenomenon. In one experiment, dogs were given bones to gnaw while two different kinds of prerecorded growls were played to them: playful growls and defensive growls. To the human ear, the growls are almost indistinguishable. However, it was observed that a statistically significant number of dogs would leave the bone alone whenever a defensive growl was played to them. In another experiment, human infants were instrumented with electrodes and two types of prerecorded human voices were played to them: calm, soothing voices and angry voices. The infants were observed to remain calm when hearing calm, soothing voices and to become agitated when hearing angry ones. "It is uncanny!" said Doctor Obvious, a Behavioral Scientist at Johns Hopkins University (no relation to the famous Captain Obvious). "It is as if there exists some innate, private channel of communication that we cannot directly observe." How is it that a mere infant, incapable of even parsing the sentence "I am feeling very angry right now!" is nevertheless able to sense anger? To an Asperger Syndrome sufferer such as Doctor Obvious, this appears as a great mystery.

It appears that animals, human infants and, to a lesser extent, adult humans have the uncanny ability to read minds. It is not a pure sort of telepathy; for instance, it is of no use when trying to figure out what random number your dog or someone happens to be thinking of. (If a mind is sufficiently simple, it is sometimes possible to sense what dollar amount it is thinking of.) It is also not a pure sort of telepathy because it generally doesn't work over distance. A lot of it depends on physical proximity, and on synesthetic perception, which combines sight, sound, smell, touch and other senses into a single perceptual bundle. It is a sort of communication that arises spontaneously out of shared experience, and cannot be simulated or reconstituted in its absence.

Animals can be taught to make all sorts of noises, but they can rarely be taught to associate them with specific meanings. For instance, I taught our cat to whisper when meowing, to avoid waking up my wife. Now I can say "Shhh!" and the cat will meow silently. She will only do this in my wife's is absence. It doesn't matter whether my wife is sleeping or out for a walk or in France: the cat doesn't distinguish between different kinds of absence. She doesn't mean anything specific by her silent meowing, except "Fine, I'll be quiet if I must." I know this because, after years of study, I have learned to read her simple cat mind.

It is rather similar with us humans. We can learn to say all sorts of things and sound quite educated and intelligent, but of course it all still boils down to one thing: "Me! I am well-spoken, well-read and well-informed! My opinion matters! Listen to meeeeee!" To which I say, "Shhh!" Just as songbirds learn their specific birdsong to fit into bird society, we try to learn the dominant dialect—be it posh or jargon-laden or bad-ass or pseudo-folksy or crazy mumbling—so that we can say what those around us want to hear. Just as with birdsong, human speech is mostly not about communication but about demonstrating one's fitness. The actual communication happens along other channels: subtleties of voice, body language, sight, touch, smell and other sense-data, which I hesitate to call data since they cannot be usefully observed and recorded.

To be sure, we humans do have some communication strategies up our sleeves that give us a major advantage over other animals. These boil down to our ability to use what linguists call "wh" words (what, when, where and so on) along with their corresponding "th" words (that, then, there, etc.) which linguists call deictic terms, from the Greek δεῖξις (point of reference). We also have ways of indicating entities that aren't immediately present or visible ("the big rock on the other side of that hill") or not even directly observable (electrons, black holes) or that are never actually observable (angels, elves, pixies, etc.) This is all either useful or entertaining, or both, but we also have the strange ability to play a sort of mental puppet theater with entities that we can't directly observe, or can only observe under special, staged circumstances ("Behold, the Wizard of Oz!" or "Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States!") and it is here that we tend to get into an awful lot of mental difficulty that other animals seem to be able to avoid.

Our species' hypertrophied linguistic abilities have allowed us to create entire systems composed of elements that we either cannot directly observe or cannot observe at all: mathematics, physics, ideologies, theologies, economies, democracies, technocracies and the like, which manipulate abstractions—symbols and relationships between symbols—rather than the concrete, messy, non-atomistic entities that have specific spacial and temporal extents and that constitute reality for all species. There is a continuum between products of pure thought, such as chess or mathematics, sciences which produce theories that can be tested by repeatable direct experiment, such as physics and chemistry, and the rest—political science, economics, sociology and the like—which are a hodgepodge of iffy assumptions and similarly iffy statistical techniques. Perfectly formal systems of thought, such as logic and mathematics, seem the most rigorous, and have served as the guiding light for all other forms of thinking. But there's a problem.

The problem is that formal systems don't work. They have internal consistency, to be sure, and they can do all sorts of amusing tricks, but they don't map onto reality in a way that isn't essentially an act of violence. When mapped onto real life, formal systems of thought self-destruct, destroy nature, or, most commonly, both. Wherever we look, we see systems that we have contrived run against limits of their own making: burning fossil fuels causes global warming, plastics decay and produce endocrine disruptors, industrial agriculture depletes aquifers and destroys topsoil, and so on. We are already sitting on a mountain of guaranteed negative outcomes—political, environmental, ecological, economic—and every day those of us who still have a job go to work to pile that mountain a little bit higher.

Although this phenomenon can be observed by anyone who cares to see it, those who have observed it have always laid blame for it on the limitations and the flaws of the systems, never on the limitations and the flaws of the human ability to think and to reason. For some un-reason, we feel that our ability to reason is limitless and infinitely perfectable. Nobody has voiced the idea that the exercise of our ability to think can reach the point of diminishing, then negative, returns. It is yet to be persuasively argued that the human propensity for abstract reasoning is a defect of breeding that leads to collective insanity. Perhaps the argument would have to be made recursively: the faculty in question is so flawed that it is incapable of seeing its own flaws.

Or we can argue that argument itself is perhaps not the right approach, and instead rely on direct observation. Formal systems and languages can be taught to machines, but natural human languages cannot. Observe that there aren't any robots that can speak a language—any non-formal language—with any degree of mental adequacy. This is not for lack of trying: there have been many large, ambitious efforts to capture all aspects of human language, including semantic models of the "real world"—all to no avail. As far as robotic technology, artificial intelligence and the like, all we can do is breed autistic savants. Lock some high-functioning autistic people in a room with some expensive computer equipment, and eventually they manage to reproduce, electronically if not biologically.

Humans lack the ability to make machines human, but they certainly do have the ability to make themselves machine-like, and some of us have formed a subspecies that mostly interacts with machines, and with other machine-like humans. There are now hordes of humans running around compulsively diddling their electronic life support units. Why do we need to design and manufacture robots when we can just breed them? When it comes to making machines that work and play well with other species, our record is no better. Yes, there are documented cases of cats that ride around on Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, but we are decades away from engineering a Roomba that could successfully fetch a ride on a cat. Yes, it certainly is possible to condition animals to behave in a machine-like fashion, but people who do so stand to be accused of cruelty to animals. They should stick to experimenting on humans.

Another approach to take toward dislodging the strange notion that human ability to think knows no bounds is to put it down to an innate fault of human language (well, almost every human language): the arbitrary distinction it draws between being and doing, or between state and action. For no adequately explored reason, being is grammatically more often a state than an act. Is it easy to be you, or is it hard work? If so, how do you do it—be, that is? If you not so much act as happen or occur, then everything you do is the result of everything that you've done and that's happened to you over your entire life. If you speak a language, it is just your being acting itself out. There is, then, no language that can be abstracted away from your entire existence, any more than a meow can be meaningfully abstracted away from a given physical cat: you have to be there to hear it, or it's just not the same. Those who are interested in this train of thought should look up Phenomenology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is my particular favorite.

If making machines into humans runs into difficulties with how well humans are able to think about machines, then what about the converse? How well can we fashion humans into machines, and where does that begin to break down? Making humans into machines (aside from direct human-machine interaction) commonly goes under the names of politics, political science and social engineering. The most advanced model of social organization we have attained is known as representative democracy, where all sorts of different people can make their opinions heard by voting, and their elected representatives then see to it that the majority opinion prevails on a wide array of public policy decisions.

Modern society is highly specialized, and so there are all sorts of different people, who know a whole lot about certain things and next to nothing about everything else. Suppose we have a society that consists of dogs, cats and sheep. You wouldn't want to take a sheep hunting with you, dogs are useless at trimming a lawn or rodent control, and cats... well, you get the picture. But they can still form opinions on all these things that they know nothing about, can't they? And then they can periodically go and cast a vote, to give voice to their opinions. Usually the "Baahs" carry the vote. When their elected representatives can't tell their constituents' opinions from their votes alone (this is the part that always makes me laugh) they have to look to opinion polls to find out what the populace is thinking at the moment; that is, what the sheep think of duck hunting and rodent control, and what sort of grass dogs and cats should have to eat. Alternatively, the different animals can form special interest groups, to lobby the government and to counter the prevailing majority opinion. But the politicians don't like to be seen as "caving in" to the special interests. And so either you have a corruption of the democratic process by the undue influence of special interests, or the "Baahs" prevail. And that is the best the world of politics has to offer, because alternative political arrangements are commonly viewed as being even worse.

Doesn't it seem laughable that the entire edifice of modern political science rests on mere opinion? Some mornings I entertain up to a dozen mutually contradictory opinions, and that's before even getting off the toilet! It is a flaw of the English language that when someone is convinced of something, the result is said to be a change of opinion. If one is indeed convinced, wouldn't that change one's convictions? But it's easy to see why nobody bothers to conduct "conviction surveys," because the results would be quite boring. Convictions hardly ever change, because they are generally not amenable to persuasion or argument. Convictions tend to form as a result of actual experiences, not from listening to pundits or experts or from reading the popular press. They form part of who we are, not what we might be thinking at any given moment.

It is almost impossible to change someone's convictions through persuasion or argument, and it is equally difficult to cause someone to form convictions through these same means. That is why the most difficult subjects of our time—ones involving hard issues such as overpopulation, natural resource use and depletion, global climate destabilization, looming national bankruptcy and the like—are more or less left out of public discourse. They are of no consequence as matters of opinion, while as matters of conviction they are political dynamite. Plus, just how many people are there whose lives have provided them with the experiences they would need to form convictions on these subjects? These subjects are avoided for the same reason one doesn't leave coiled hoses lying around a slaughterhouse: the sheep might think that they are seeing snakes, stampede and ruin your whole work-shift. It is much better to just let them move smoothly along and cast their vote for "Baah!"

The relatively few people who do have firm convictions are often regarded as "unreasonable" because their convictions cannot be reasoned away as mere opinions can. That to me seems exactly as it should be. Humanity is in the process of demonstrating that it can successfully reason its way into a cul de sac. But is there any reason to believe that it can also reason its way out of it? Perhaps it is high time to start being unreasonable, to decide for ourselves that we do not like the cul de sac into which our reason has steered us, and to refuse to go into it any deeper. Perhaps we could even find a way out of it. And perhaps a few of those people whose minds you can sometimes almost read will almost be able to read our minds as well, and will choose to follow us out. And the rest will just stand around and argue about it: "Baah!"

Bloody Tulips!

Excellent photo gallery of the uprising in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

[Update: Ethnic cleansing of the Uzbek minority in the south of Kyrgyzstan was organized by a nephew of the overthrown president Bakiev.]

Five years ago Kyrgyzstan (former Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic) went through a so-called "tulip revolution." Organized by George Soros and the usual suspects from the Orange Revolution Syndicate, they got rid of one unsavory dictator and installed another one – all in the name of democracy and freedom, of course. And now, just five years later, an uprising has taken place, the president and his entourage have fled, the government buildings have been looted, and the people are dividing up the land that they feel the rich elites have stolen from them.

This little country is important to the United States only because geography forces US and NATO to use it as a trans-shipment point for resupplying their endless war in Afghanistan. It is also used to channel out a lot of Afghanistan's heroin export. The proceeds from the heroin trade end up in Western banks, and that, in turn, keeps the war going.

But in spite of all the drug money flowing through the system, the Orange Revolution Syndicate is not doing so well these days. They lost the Ukraine, Georgia has been in the political morgue since it started and lost a war with Russia, and now they have lost Kyrgyzstan as well. Poor George Soros! There just aren't that many countries left in the world that a multi-billionaire like him can undermine using his ill-gotten gains in the name of "open society."

Fearless Russian photojournalists have wandered into this mess, and have brought us this. Many thanks to them and to RT for letting us see for ourselves what a contemporary revolution looks like: bloody and chaotic as ever, but brought to us via cell phones and the Internet, with order restored by citizens using all of the advanced communications technology at their disposal to organize their effort. This is not your grandfather's revolution.

Collapse Competitively

[En français]

We are heading toward economic, political and social collapse, and every day that passes brings it closer. But we just don't know when to stop, do we? Which part of "the harder we try, the harder we fail" can't we understand? Why can't we understand that each additional dollar of debt will drive us into national bankruptcy faster, harder and deeper? Why can't we grasp the concept that each additional dollar of military spending further undermines our security? Is there some sort of cognitive impairment that prevents us from understanding that each additional dollar sunk into the medical industry will only make us sicker? Why can't we see that each incremental child we bear into this untenable situation will make life harder for all children? In short, what on earth is our problem?

Why can't we stop? We can blame evolution, which has produced in us instincts that compel us to gorge ourselves when food is abundant, to build up fat reserves for the lean months. These instincts are not helpful to us when there is an all-you-can-eat buffet nearby that's open year-round. These instincts are not even specifically ours: other animals don't know when to stop either. Butterflies will feast on fermented fruit until they are too drunk to fly. Pigs will eat acorns until they are too fat to stand up and have to resort to crawling about on their bellies in order to, yes of course, eat more acorns. Americans who are too fat to walk are considered disabled and the government issues them with little motorized scooters so that they don't have to suffer the indignity of crawling to the all-you-can-eat buffet on their bellies. This is considered progress.

Or we can blame our education, which puts mathematical reasoning ahead of our common sense. Mathematics uses induction—the idea that if 1 + 1 is 2 then 2 + 1 must be 3, and so on up to an arbitrarily large quantity. In the real world, if you are counting acorns, then 1 + 1 acorns is not the same as 1,000,000 + 1 acorns—not if there are squirrels running around, which there will be once they find out that you are the one who's been stealing their acorns. A million acorns is just too many for you to keep track of, and your concerted effort to keep adding one more to the pile while fighting off squirrels may cause small children to start calling you silly names. The bigger the pile grows, the more likely you are to have to take inventory, and in the process you are increasingly likely to make a mistake, so that it turns out that 1,000,000 + 1 is in fact 1,000,001 - δ, where δ is the number of acorns you have lost track of, somehow. Once δ > 0, you have achieved diminishing returns, and once  δ > 1, you have achieved negative returns. In the real world, the bigger you think a number should be, the smaller it actually turns out to be. At some point, trying to add one more to the pile becomes a particularly wasteful way of making the pile smaller. This result is not intellectually pleasing, and there is no theory to back it up, but it is observable anywhere you care to look. The fact that we are unable to adequately explain any given phenomenon by using our feeble primate brains does not make it any less real.

The concept of diminishing returns is quite simple for most people to understand and to observe, but notoriously difficult to detect for the person who is at the point of achieving them. The point of negative returns is even harder to detect, because by that point we tend to be too far gone to detect much of anything. If you already had N drinks, can you tell if you are at the point of diminishing returns yet? Will another drink make you happier and more sociable, or will it not make much of a difference? Or will it cause you to embarrass yourself and spend the next day nursing a debilitating hangover? Or will it send you to the emergency room to be treated for vomit inhalation? As a general rule, the more you imbibe, the more difficult it becomes for you to draw such fine distinctions. This rule does not seem to be limited to drinking, but applies to almost all behaviors that produce a feeling of euphoria rather than the simple satisfaction of needs. Most of us can stop ourselves from drinking too much water, or eating too much porridge, or stacking too many bales of hay. Where we do tend to run into trouble with self-control is when it comes to things that are particularly pleasurable or addictive, such as drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and rich and delicious food. And we tend to lose it completely when it comes to euphoria-inducing social semi-intangibles: satisfaction of greed, status-seeking, and power over others.

Is this the best we can do? Certainly not! Human culture is full of examples where people stood up and successfully opposed such primitive tendencies within themselves. The ancient Greeks made a virtue of moderation: the temple of Apollo at Delphi bore the inscription MHΔEN AΓAN—"Nothing in excess." Taoist philosophy focuses on the idea of balance between yin and yang (阴 阳)—seemingly contrary natural forces that in fact work together and must be kept in balance. Even in contemporary engineering culture one sometimes hears the motto "Better is the enemy of good enough." Sadly, though, engineers who are good enough to abide by it are something of a rarity. At the micro level of solving specific problems most engineers do strive to achieve the clever optimum rather then the stupid maximum, but at the macro level the surrounding business culture forces them to always go for the stupid maximum (maximum growth, revenue and profits) or the stupid minimum (minimum cost, product cycle time and maintainability). They are forced to do so by the influence of a truly pernicious concept that has insinuated itself into most aspects of our culture: the concept of competition.

The concept of competition seems to have first been elevated to cult status by games that were played as a form of sacrifice before gods, in cultures as different as ancient Greece and the Mayan civilization, where competitive events were held to please their various deities. I much prefer the Olympic version, where the object of the games was to express the ideal of human perfection in both form and function, rather than the Mayan version, where the outcome of the game was used to decide who would be sacrificed on the altar of some peculiar cultural archetype, but being open-minded I am ready to accept either as valid, because both are competitions in defense of principle. It was Aristotle who pointed out that pursuit of principle is the one area where moderation is not helpful, and who am I to refute Aristotle? But when moving from defending an ideal or a principle to performing mundane, practical, utilitarian functions it is the idea of competition itself that should be offered up as a nice, sizzling-fat burnt offering on the altar of our common sense.

If the goal is to achieve an adequate result with a minimum of effort, then why would two people want to compete to do the job of one? And if there is in fact work enough for two, then why wouldn't they want to cooperate instead of wasting their precious energies in competition? Well, they may have been brainwashed into thinking that they must compete in order to succeed, but that's beside the point. The point is that there is a major difference between competing for the sake of a principle—such as the perfection of divine creation—and competing for mere money. There is nothing divine about a big pile of money, and, just as with a big pile of acorns, the bigger the pile, the more "squirrels" it tends to attract. In fact, those who are sitting on some of the bigger piles of acorns often seem rather squirrely themselves. To mix metaphors, they also tend to be chicken-like, roosting on their acorns and expecting them to hatch into more acorns. But be they squirrels or be they chickens, or be they drug-addled mutant chicken-squirrels on steroids, they are certainly not gods, and their acorns are not worthy of our sacrifice.

Once we dispense with the idea that competition is in any sense necessary, or even desirable, new avenues of thought open up. How much is enough? Probably much less than we have now. How hard do we need to work for it? Probably a lot less hard than we are working now. What happens if we don't have enough? Well, perhaps then it's time to try working just a tiny bit harder, or, better yet, perhaps it is time to take a few acorns from those who still have too many. Since having too much is such hard work (mind the damn squirrels!) we'd only be helping them. We certainly don't want to keep up with them, because we know where they are headed—a quaint, exclusive little place called collapse. What we should probably be trying to do instead is to establish some sort of balance, where enough is, in fact, enough.