Fear: The Great Motivator

By

On The Beach

It has always appeared to me that the most powerful emotion of mankind in these days is fear. As others on these pages have pointed out, we are awash every moment with messages that might cause us to fear. Fear seems ubiquitous and ever present.

Fear of dying, fear of illness, fear of abandonment, fear of loss of loved ones, fear of flying, fear of being in public, fear of being alone, fear of not having enough money, fear of becoming homeless, fear of loss of your stuff, fear of not having enough to eat, fear of having too much to eat, fear of war, fear of alien invasion, fear of aliens (of all kinds), fear of loss of status, fear of looking like a fool, fear of not fitting in, fear of spiders, fear of the unknown, fear of snakes, fear of the known, fear of close spaces, fear of wide open spaces, fear of ....................

FEAR!

You name it and someone close to you is afraid of it and lives with constant fear, a physical state that is not sustainable without damage to your body. Fear will make you sick, mentally and physically sick.

Yet, if you really look at many of these fears, most of them seem like nonsense. A result of living lives so far removed from real natural life that the modern lives themselves seem like a fraud. I don’t know how many of you had parents from the great depression or grandparents from the 1880’s. Can you imagine those people wasting a second in fear of some of these things that seem so normal to cause fear now?

I used to think that conditioning people to constantly be in a state receptive to fear was the primary motivator used on most people. Man’s intense desire to escape or avoid fear in their lives allowed easy control. People could be lead like mindless, almost brain-dead, creatures to do all sorts of things as long as they thought what they were doing would lead to less fear than anything else they might be doing.

I still think this is the main control mechanism. Fear is an emotion. To me, an emotion is a way of thinking that has become a habit. That does not make emotion bad, falling under the connotations of ‘habits’. I like things that put smiles on my face effortlessly. It just means that as a habit, most people are no longer thinking about what causes them fear. They just experience the emotion without any thought or proprioception of thought at all.

A kind of mindlessness.

Modernity is filled with messages, both real and false, that just by themselves would produce a sense of fear. Modernity is also filled with overwhelming social strictures, institutions of structure and belief that are so huge and restrictive that they grind individuals to mush without having to actually do anything directly to the individual at all. There is such a sense of powerlessness in the face of such enormity of intent and evil that these institutions have easily encouraged the emotion of fear.

We can understand what I am talking about in these institutions by remembering our own understanding of these sorts of social conditions from the propaganda handed to us about what it was like living under Nazi or USSR rules. These were overpowering and impersonal governments of rules that cared not a bit for the individual. Or at least that is what we were told. We were afraid of falling under some sort of system like they had, we were taught to be afraid of ‘bad’ institutions.

Recently though I have been thinking more about this control mechanism of fear, and now I think there is another more powerful issue working in the background of each person of modernity: a real reason for fear. A malaise so powerful and deadly that susceptibility to fear is a direct consequence of this disease. A disease created by modernity specifically to weaken and infect mankind with a sense of powerlessness. This disease makes the conditioning and social structures of modernity thousands of times more effective in producing fear.

This disease has caused mankind to lose something essential and present in each and every person born in this physical place of Mother Earth. It is a birth-rite of man and it has been lost, atrophied to near nothingness now, a vague vestige that at best causes mental itching and discomfort, cognitive dissonance perhaps.

But how do I talk about the loss of something that almost no one even knows they’ve lost, or even had to lose? In fact, to even talk about this thing as if it were real will label me as a nut case; obviously crazy, way way out of any sort of social norms and acceptable beliefs.

So, even though I have never been one to claim any kin with normalcy, I will enlist the assistance of two other TIF contributors to help me describe and explain what has been lost. At least then there will be three of us talking about this heresy. And they are so much more eloquent than I am.

I want to quote a comment left by the contributor Element when he commented on an essay of Cog Dis on Zerohedge back in October of 2011. You could grind through, pound through, agonize over, and struggle with 10,000 pages of Buddhist or Hindu or science esoterica and never see this subject stated so clearly or simply or beautifully.

Personally, I was stunned when I read it. It is poetry on the page, a beautiful exclamation of our universe and what we should be. I think Element is channeling the poet E.E. Cummings (just kidding).

Fri, 10/28/2011 - 06:42 |

Element

“And so on it goes, back and forth into infinity.”

 

Not into infinity Cog, but into a false-finite, that likes to pretend to be limitless, .. and also likes to build the illusions that it is all the mind there is.

What goes on in the thinking aspect of the mind is the generation of a fake-finite

A closed self-referencing process, that seeks to occur within a cosmos that actually has no real finite in it, of any kind. That this fake formulation of finite 'exists' ONLY in and AS the thinker, and not outside the thinker, not outside the skull of man.

Just like you get a closed repeatable pseudo-'random' algorithm (the 'random' you are having when you are not having random), you also get a pseudo-finite (the fake 'finite' you are having when you are not having any finite), generated via thinking (itself), in closed terms, about arbitrarily-defined abstract boundaries that we call 'objects', which form the basis of 'objective thought'.

The fake-finite 'thinker' is thus created. ... but it is a actually a fake ... a fake mind no less!

In an actual cosmos that has no actual finite, how representative, or accurate is any representation of actuality, thus determined as an objective thought construct, an idea, a world-view ...

How 'true' potentially can it ever be, or become?

ZERO ... and people fear that ... for they think they will lose their minds ...

And they should! ... lose their FAKE MIND, that is.

That is 'Enlightenment', in a nutshell.

(and yes, I know you did not understand it, I would know you were lying if you said you did)

And if you happened to learn that DIRECTLY ... (i.e. not from someone else) then you sure won't be too bothered by the pseudo-finite products constantly plopping out of the rear-quarters of the closed-loop 'modern' mind of any 'thinker'.

You would actually have seen DIRECTLY that they are fake. Not fake(s), not even fake somethings or other.

Nope, just fake  ... the fake MIND.

I suggest (and without a shred of evidence I might add) that, that is not the real mind of a man, or woman, at all.

the real mind is infinitely beyond and completely without connection to any sort of fake-finite 'objective-mind' process, or processing.

L O S E   Y O U R   M I N D

(Yes, I know, I know, ... your objective fake-mind is right now going, "well just how the fuck do I do that?!" ... it doesn't have ANYTHING to do with it, is how )

Actually do that and you'll be astonished to DISCOVER that you already have an ACTUAL MIND in there - as well as that shitty fake one, that you think so highly of up until now, and you will discover is completely fake, and out of touch with the physical infinity that you in fact are.

Just sayin

Simply magical. Read this quote as many times as it takes to understand what Element is saying.

One and a half pages of possibly the most elegant description of the real us and of the real reality we actually do live in that I have ever read.

As Element says, you cannot experience this by reading about it. You have to just experience it. And that is very very difficult for your conditioned fake mind to do. It will rebel at the very idea of becoming lost in infinity.

But infinity is exactly what the conscious universe is and it is exactly what your consciousness is in that infinite universe.

And now the even shorter but just as elegant comment by Cog Dis on one of his essays on Zerohedge:

Sat, 01/18/2014 - 09:39 |

Cognitive Dissonance

Consciousness has no 'location', thus the non-local part. I can most certainly locate my physical avatar. It's located on the third rock from the sun. My consciousness is not located there. Or maybe I need to say it is not 'centered' there if that helps. The language we use to describe our 'being', our 'self' is imperfect and designed to obscure and confuse.

My avatar has a reputation. My reputation can be assaulted and denounced. My reputation is not "I". It is a construct of the reality my physical avatar resides in. Our problems result from our present inability to distinguish between our avatars, and all things avatar, and our 'self', our consciousness.

CD is saying that his consciousness is not located in the physical, but in what he calls a “non-local” place. If we assume Element is right about the universe, then CD’s consciousness is located somewhere in that infinity.

And CD’s consciousness is also infinite, if we assume these two statements as being correct.

This all seems fantastical, the stuff of dreams or science fiction or even some strange esoteric Eastern belief system.

But what happens to you if this is really true and you really could easily connect to those infinite parts of yourself and all life around you? One thing I can think of off the very top of my local conscious head is that fear of almost all the normal physical types simply drop away. There might be fear, but it certainly is not about anything physical. How can an entity that can experience itself as infinite be fearful of death in the physical, for instance?

Losing this infinite part of ourselves makes us all much more a cripple than any paraplegic you might imagine. The paraplegic’s loss is understandable and tragic. Our loss is partially self-inflicted and even more tragic. We are operating in our normal physical universe at less than 1% of our real capacity.

And we all recognize our loss of the infinite connection to the infinite life around us even though we don’t actually have the words or experienced knowledge to know of that loss. We grieve deeply in our physical bodies and physical minds and cosmic spiritual bodies over this loss. We are deeply damaged by this loss of connection to life itself. Our suffering is immense. This suffering makes fear of more suffering so much easier to achieve.

This is the real power of modernity. This has been the real goal of about 30,000 years of constant and continual effort at conditioning. The result is almost total estrangement of man from his real true nature. It has lead to uncountable suffering and pain for all life on earth and that was exactly the intended result.

To stop your personal fear and suffering you could try to connect to the infinite. CD says he talks to trees. That is one very good way. That conversation can lead to your non-local consciousness taking control of your physical consciousness and letting you slip into the thoughts and consciousness of the tree and every living thing connected to that tree.

Which is everything on Earth, maybe even to the Infinite itself if you are brave and fearless.

Every single thing is alive in some conscious way and man has a unique ability to connect consciously with all life on the physical Mother Earth.

I don’t think you will ever be the same if you allow this to happen. You will not become lost. You will find yourself. You will not be in a dream; you will wake up, perhaps for the first time since a tiny baby.

But one thing that will happen is you will no longer live in mindless fear. The power of modernity over you will drop away from you like a nightmare. You will be amazed at your new self and its strength.

But, as CD has said many times, knowing this infinite reality as truth is not enough. You must then work on this truth.

Being placed inside this beautiful sphere of pure life gifts us with easy connections to all this life, but we have been lead astray and become lost. We must work with the grace of life around us and find our way out of our nightmare. This will take personal effort, but rewards of strength and peace wait at each step toward truth and understanding a person can take.

And there is lots of help waiting for each of you if you learn how to connect to that help. Do not think that all is evil and you will be lead astray at every turn. You can learn how to identify those who would do you harm and you can learn how to avoid them. That is part of your responsibility as a living creature of earth. But it is not so easy to do when you lack the skills and abilities of the Infinite. Skills that are actually your birth rite as a human animal.

Personally I’ve never considered myself a good cow and have no intention of being easily milked or eaten.

04-11-2014

On The Beach

 

P.S. On The Beach submitted all the images used in this article including the header image. Sadly I had to crop the header image in order to fit it, so I am reproducing it below in order that all may read the caption.

Cognitive Dissonance

Peter Offermann

[email protected]

Few who are paying attention to world events, through a lens more precise than the Main Stream Media, would deny that the vast majority of humans are being badly abused by their leadership in a  variety of venues ranging from local, regional, national, and international politicians and bureaucrats,  financial managers, corporate controllers, religious leaders, media moguls and warlords.

The vast majority of humans appear oblivious to this abuse and passively accept what is being done to them. Why is that? In one word, ‘conditioning’.

The vastly increased access to information that the internet enabled is responsible for a large number of people at least becoming aware of this abuse. However even among this more aware group, taking effective action to stop the abuse is sorely lacking. Why is that?  In one word, ‘conditioning’.

There is a much smaller group that are proactively attempting to counter the abuse through group protest but they are losing the struggle. Why is that? In one word, ‘conditioning’.

At 68 I am getting on in years. I have lived a full life and have had the time to reflect back on my path through life.  As a result I have come to realize that most of the conditioning we are all subject to did not incapacitate me nearly as much as it did most people. I believe the realizations I have come to regarding my seeming immunity to conditioning are a necessary foundation required for people to free themselves from the tyranny that enslaves them.

With that hope in mind I would like to share some experiences from my youth that illustrate the problem (conditioning), and hint at the solution.

Our conditioning begins at the moment of our birth. Although they are not conscious of it, our parents, and family members, begin the process. Our parents have been conditioned before us and all their ‘conditioned’ traditions are passed on to us without considering their consequences. How often have you heard the excuse? “That’s just the way things are, get over it!” There is a great book by Wilhelm Reich called, “The Function of the Orgasm”, that explains the form of and reasons for this early in life conditioning. Yes our sexuality plays a large role.

It is widely accepted that our late childhood, and early adulthood years are our formative ones and also when we are in our prime both intellectually and physically. Historically people began taking full responsibility for their own lives much earlier in their lives during what we consider late childhood. There were once 14 year old admirals that oversaw large naval forces. The commitment of marriage and raising a family began much earlier. Pioneers struck out to discover and populate new mysterious lands before they reached their teens.

The most rigid and destructive conditioning is imposed on us during our schooling. Our schooling is starting earlier and lasting much longer than previously and while we are being ‘schooled’ we are not considered full adults with the responsibilities and freedoms such status implies.

Why is that? Could it be that control in our society is much more rigid than ever before? Those that control us realize that a rebellion of youth is the most dangerous kind. How better to minimize their impact than by keeping their status at ‘children’ with little access to power until well past their prime years. If people cave in to ‘slavehood’ during their prime years, how likely are they to rebel when they are past their prime, especially if they are burdened with excessive debt from their education?

I will only touch on the subject of our schooling lightly here and point out what I see as the most debilitating habits we are taught. The subject is an immense one covered well by people such as John Taylor Gatto, author of, “The Underground History of American Education”.

Disclaimer: I quit school in the early 60’s while in grade 9, at age 14.   The reason being I felt I was being made dumber instead of smarter. My parent’s response was, “if you don’t go to school we will not support you.” I left home then and took on responsibility for my own life.

Even though I chose a different path than most I did not really understand intellectually why I did what I did then until recently, about a half a century later. What I did then, I did intuitively, rather than logically while accepting full responsibility for the outcome.

I first spent a few years hoboing around Canada taking whatever work I could find whenever I needed it. No job was too menial or too challenging to accept.

At 17 I took on a job that turned my life around and led to my conditioning mostly sliding off me.

This job was as a fire lookout man with the British Columbia (Canada) Forest Service. For a number of years I worked and lived on remote mountain tops, by myself, for 3 to 4 months each year. Spending that much time completely alone and removed from civilization, especially during my formative years, had a profound effect on my perceptions about life as a human being and how I fit into society.

rendered by me from a photo by Kyle Johnson http://kjphotos.com/portfolio/outside

I didn’t have a camera in those days so the image above, which closely represents my situation, is used to illustrate the setting.

Below is a photograph of myself taken a few years later in the same general area I spent time on the lookouts. The other photos interspersed in this essay are taken by myself as I explored the mountains near my home after my lookout years.

In current society, childhood and early adulthood peer pressure is immense. To survive in this setting we must pay close attention to others around us for clues regarding what is and is not acceptable. Because of this pressure the bulk of our energy goes into human interactions and we are pretty much oblivious to everything but our immediate environment. “Use it or lose it” is sage advice. Because of concentrating on human relations during their formative years most people have little if any connection to the natural world.

Try to imagine what people would be like if, as youngsters, they spent time exploring and living in nature, while being responsible for their own survival and actions, instead of hanging out at the mall or partying with their pals.

Is it fair to say that those that hang with the crowd are unlikely to be aware of, or able to understand, large scale events not part of their immediate environment?

What about someone who is tasked with surviving in the greater world using only their own skills? Would they stand a better chance of grasping what is going on?

Is this phenomena related to the common use of a ‘rite of manhood’ by many cultures where young adults leave the security of their group to face the wilderness on their own?

Do the majority in modern societies never go through this enabling right of passage and instead go from the security of their parents care to the security of the big brother state?

Substantial time on the lookout without peer pressure made me realize how confining trying to fit into the crowd is. Most people don’t even sense this pressure because it is all they know. It’s like the air we breath. It’s just there until it isn’t, then we die unless we are prepared for an airless environment.

Most people also don’t realize how much of their time and energy it takes to be ‘social’. Being removed from ‘socializing’ is enormously stressful if it is all you know.

Many aspiring lookout men needed to come down off the mountains prematurely because they could not stand being alone. Those that adjusted to the isolation, such as myself, came to treasure the freedom of being comfortable for extended periods with just your own company. The amount of time that then becomes available for other, possibly more worthwhile pursuits, is substantial.

In the forefront of these benefits is looking inside yourself without constantly being subjected to the opinion of others. Building friendships takes time and effort and becoming your own friend is no exception. Most of us never get the opportunity to do this.

Those that desire to control human behavior understand that people that are not their own best friend are much more susceptible to being controlled because they are lonely and seek comfort and friendship outside themselves. Virtually every sales campaign ranging from the door to door salesman to world leaders is then enabled to sell you a bill of goods that convinces you that what they have to offer is going to become your best friend.

 

Short excursions, or holidays into nature, most often with others, fitted into a busy schedule, do little to increase our awareness of the greater reality that humans exist within. Thanks to modern technology very few of these excursions actually take people far from the human controlled environment they are conditioned to.

It is one thing to climb to the top of a mountain, conquer it, and then immediately return to civilization. It is something totally different to stay in that wilderness environment for extended periods with the time to come to know those other species that are at home in those environs. It makes one realize that humans are not the be all and end all of life on earth.

Humility is born which serves us very well.  In this environment one soon comes to realize those species include the earth itself. Seeing the constant breathing of weather patterns and daily and seasonal shifts of energies makes one realize everything is made of the same stuff and ‘lives’ in it’s own unique way.

To assume the earth is a lifeless blob which we can abuse without conscious consequence is a very risky proposition.

Most people’s lives are lived out within an environment created by and for humans. Most, and more all the time, live in an urban environment.

When they holiday they take some technological means of travel which quickly takes them to the other place of human habitation they wish to holiday in. Because people’s travel experience is so brief, and misses the detail of the ground they pass over, most of which currently has no human inhabitants, it is easy for them to agree, when told by ‘experts’ that human overpopulation is a crisis.

Yes there are many urban places on the planet that suffer from overpopulation, and many more places on the planet that are being strip-mined to support those urban centers, but all in all there is an enormous amount of free space, capable of supporting humans, if only they were able to tear themselves away from the social centers they now depend on and cluster in. 

In the early 1990’s while transitioning from life in Canada to life in Mexico I drove between Canada and Mexico every second week for 3 years while gradually weaning my clients off the services I had previously offered. I was a workaholic and saw the time on the road as my own and enjoyed it by taking different highways almost every trip. Eventually I was able to drive between Mexico and Canada while only passing through  a very few towns all smaller than about 10,000 people. Most of the distance on these trips was spent on very remote highways with no other traffic to speaks of.

I can say definitively that between, Canada, the USA and Mexico there is enough uninhabited fertile land to accommodate the whole world without the residents being able to see their nearest neighbor.

This assumes we overcome our condition of needing to be part of the herd clustering in vast hordes, and also manage to disempower the laws of those that enslave us that currently make this land unavailable to us.  

Humans are far more difficult to control if they live in small clusters, all over the place, while paying little or no attention to the MSM. The propagandists can then not create a single message that will motive the whole herd of humans to act identically by broadcasting their one piece of propaganda from a single location that reaches everyone.

Propaganda still works, but it must be tailored properly to fit each unique situation in order to get consistent results. If there is no central broadcasting service the message must also be taken to each unique location individually. This is an impossible situation for our rulers and is the reason we are all so heavily conditioned to….

Need to be in close quarters with other humans.

Need the approval of others.

Think alike.

Think we must be/are part of a team.

Become isolated emotionally from ourselves and each other, even while packed on top of each other, so only big brother can offer us comfort.

Desire specialized knowledge which results in only being able to survive as part of the ‘urban’ team.

To desire a ‘carrot’ of reward that only ‘winning’ at any cost(?, within the crowd can present.

Depend on centralized services, especially sources of energy.

Depend on the rule of ‘human’ law to protect us from each other.

The most destructive conditioning takes place in our schools, right at the time we are most susceptible to it, during our formative years. During that period we have little experience of our own to compare to what we are told, and raising questions about the validity of the taught ‘truth’ is ruthlessly punished in order to force us to depend on the wisdom of others instead of our own intuition.

We are ruthlessly regimented to follow orders so that we eventually become incapable of thinking for ourselves and become dependent on the ‘boss’ to do our thinking for us. The intellectual box we become stuck within is defined by the boss.

Specialization in training, and limiting access to relevant information, (compartmentalization) is critical to our conditioning. If we cannot think for ourselves, and only understand part of the puzzle, and are incapable of deducting or intuiting answers to unknowns, we are trapped within our dependence on others.

I have personally met a number of world shaker class intellectuals, that are extremely brilliant in their own field that figuratively can’t tie their own shoe laces. This situation is not accidental. If only the boss has the full picture, the boss becomes the only one who can act effectively. Everyone else then becomes totally dependent on the Boss.

 

Away from civilization, where the boss is not handy to hold your hand, such conditioning is a disaster waiting to happen. Unless you quickly learn to identify problems before they destroy you, and also learn to fix problems you can’t avoid intuitively, without an instruction manually from the boss, you will not survive long.

Lack of education, much time spent away from conditioning influences, and conditioned humans, has changed fundamentally how I solve problems.

When faced with a problem a conditioned human will go through the channels of historical solutions until they find one that works for them.

Instead I consider the elements of the problem in place, try to intuit the workings of the device/situation, and then pinpoint what part is going wrong. No manual is needed, just the ability to think a situation through for myself.

Using only this skill I have managed to live my whole life well, if not always comfortably, while being considered an essential resource by many people with far more education than myself, even in areas they have expertise in.

No one is perfect and you will make mistakes when you think for yourself. Mistakes are often painful, but if you accept the possibility of making mistakes and are willing to learn from them when you make them you will eventually become a very robust and capable person. What doesn’t break you strengthens you.

If you are afraid of making mistakes you are stuck on the safe (?) road built by our bosses. You still might not be safe, but at least you can then blame your mistakes on someone else.

I have learned far more from my mistakes than from my successes. I am now very thankful for my mistakes, even though some were very painful to navigate.

This essay is getting long so I will end it with one last point about what I learned from my life on the lookouts.

While we are thrust into the middle of ongoing intense personal inter-relationships, especially during our formative years, our attention remains strongly focused on each interaction as it occurs and the rest of the world passes us by unnoticed. We see the trees but are oblivious of the forest. This is most often a habit we carry throughout life and it is a very dangerous one in our propaganda filled world.

We see each piece of new propaganda as a standalone piece of information. We have no perspective to see if how it fits into the forest makes sense. We are then at the mercy of those that would deceive us for their own purpose. All they need to do is grab our attention and then then can do as they like.

On a lookout tasked with quickly finding dangerous anomalies, within a vast vista of forests, becoming focused on each tree individually is not productive and makes it impossible to see the whole picture. A good lookout man eventually learns to quickly scan vast vistas without focusing on anything in particular. Taking this approach to finding required data points allows our intuition to come to our aid. It always amazed me how glaringly anomalies stand out when using this method.

It works just as well in any other environment, including researching on the internet. When surrounded by questionable ‘news/propaganda’ the fires stick out much more obviously when we also are aware of the apparently unrelated surrounding information that is part of webscape. If there’s no smoke there probably isn’t a fire. Our intuition can see the difference even though we logically can’t. Following our intuition instead of remaining focused on the propaganda leads us to the information that will allow us to make sense of the situation.

For those who managed to slog through to this point thank you for your attention.

Peter

 

[My love of music has me suggesting that a song be played in the background while you’re reading this. There are a couple I’d like to suggest: Talking Heads-Nothing but Flowers; Blue Rodeo-Lost Together (must have some Canadian content); or, given the Ukraine/Syria/Iran/North Korea/Venezuela/Congo African Republic/Senkaku-Daiyou Islands/etc. situations, Frankie Goes to Hollywood-Two Tribes. Enjoy]

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The ebb and flow of societies is well documented by historians and archaeologists. It seems every society rises in complexity to a zenith of some kind and then falls. There are an increasing number of people who contend that this sociopolitical transformation is fast-approaching for our globalised, industrial civilization, and of those some believe that this shift will be a long drawn out affair of slow decline[i], while others suggest it may be more of a sudden shift[ii], or collapse[iii].

Whether this change takes generations or is much more sudden and dramatic matters not (unless you’re living through the latter one, I suppose); one’s perception of this depends upon the temporal perspective taken. For example, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the oil-dependent, industrialized society of humans lasts 400 years, 200 years up and 200 years down (I think I’m being overly generous here on the demise side).

A 200-year decline may, given normalcy bias, not be perceived as a significant shift at all by those experiencing it. However, if we can step back and view this rise and fall in larger historical terms, say on a 10,000-year basis, this ascent/descent scenario may be perceived as quick and calamitous. I think perspective is everything here. (Note that I’ll continue to refer to the impending change as ‘collapse’ because I tend to believe the change will come quickly, especially once the power grid fails.)

That being said, the antecedents of such collapse are varied and complex. They range from declining marginal returns[iv] to environmental collapse[v] to psychological shifts[vi] to overshooting local carrying capacity[vii] to Peak Oil[viii] to population growth[ix]. Humans don’t require artificial intelligence that perceives us as a threat, a viral pandemic leading to a zombie apocalypse, or an alien invasion for our resources to push us over the cliff; we don’t even need a nuclear war. We have our own non-military, sociocultural peculiarities to accomplish it.

As with any complex, dynamical system, the variables that lead to collapse interact in ways both knowable and surprising (such are the emergent phenomenon that arise from complex systems). Feedback that might provide clues to the coming demise tends to be ignored, delayed, or misinterpreted, resulting in dismissal of clear signals. In fact, oftentimes, the actions taken by players can expedite the process of collapse. To this end, I believe that our economic system, with globalisation efforts and its underlying foundation of infinite growth, may be the catalyst that pushes our industrial civilisation over the impending cliff of collapse. But, who really knows? My guess is about as good as anybody else’s[x].

What are some of the components contributing to this collapse endgame? I offer a few: exponential growth of population; dependency on fossil fuels; human hubris; economic credit/debt obligations; climate change; peak resources (especially oil and water); delayed feedback; corrupt political/economic systems; misperceptions; accumulation of toxins/pollutants; misleading information; and just plain, old ignorance (some purposeful I believe). And, don’t forget the black swans.

To me, population growth seems to be the factor that we have pushed in the wrong direction but the underlying variable to this is energy. Populations do not grow if there is not enough energy to support such growth. This energy may take the form of domesticated animal and plant life, or long-stored, concentrated energy (i.e. fossil fuels), but at its base is solar energy and how it is exploited. For tens of thousands of years human population was held in check by limited energy exploitation. The ‘Agricultural Revolution’ certainly gave a boost to human population, especially within new villages, towns, and cities erupting all over the globe. However, once fossil fuels began to be exploited our population took off in a global, exponential explosion. It is this exponential growth of human population that has put us in this bind we are in.

To better understand what is happening, I believe one of the fundamental pieces of information to get a grip on is, in fact, exponential growth. Exponential growth is a concept well-known (think compound interest) but whose consequence has been lost on many. The late Dr. Albert Bartlett was perhaps one of the leading authorities on the implications of such growth and spent much of his professional career attempting to educate people about it. In a presentation he gave thousands of times and was viewed many more times on youtube (viewed more than 1/4 million times; not bad for an old guy lecturing about mathemtics) he outlines the importance of it and its consequences.

Entitled ‘Arithmetic, Population, and Energy’[xi], Bartlett argues, among other things, that zero population growth will happen whether we wish it to or not, it is a mathematical certainty. In the words of others, if something cannot grow forever, it won’t. However, as Bartlett points out, we hold near and dear to our hearts many things that are contributing to overpopulation: education, healthcare, immigration, sanitation, law and order. On the other side of the ledger, however, are forces that counter these: war, famine, disease, accidents, murder, abortion, and infanticide. His point is that we can either deal with the issue of overpopulation by changing our behaviours (and attitudes) or nature will do it for us; the choice is ours (or is it?).

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…here we can see the human dilemma—everything we regard as good makes the population problem worse, everything we regard as bad helps solve the problem. There is a dilemma if ever there was one.

Dr. Albert Bartlett

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A burgeoning population and its implications for human sustainability on a finite planet has been around for some time. Thomas Malthus’s treatise on the subject in 1798 being perhaps one of the most well known. Had Malthus known of the incredible boost to global carrying capacity that was about to be unleashed by the exploitation of a one-time windfall of concentrated and easily-transportable energy, petroleum, he may not have been so adamant in his conclusion that the end of growth was near-at-hand. But such are the chances when one attempts to foretell the future.

My own biases, prejudices, predilections, observations, and experiences, suggest this human experiment we are a part of will not end well[xii]. I believe that there is too much momentum, too many people with a sense of entitlement, too many sociocultural myths, too many elite protecting the status quo, and far too much ignorance for us to avoid a global collapse. Unless, of course, Zemphram Cochrane’s trans-warp engine test on April 4, 2063 at 11:15 am, after the Third World War (aka Eugenics Wars), is seen by a Vulcan survey expedition and makes First Contact, saving us from ourselves[xiii].

What typically follows social, political, economic collapse is a ‘dark age’ of some kind and is perhaps best known (at least within Western history) by the years that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. But more on this in another post.

Despite all of the above, there are a variety of other variables that could push a teetering globe into a collapse scenario, particularly geopolitics or a natural disaster. No one knows. Prediction of the future is for meteorologists and economists, neither of which is very good beyond a couple of days for the former, and much less for the latter. I must admit, however, that Marion King Hubbert’s prediction of the coming demise of industrial civilization[xiv], along with the seminal text, The Limits to Growth[xv], are pretty good guesses in my books.

The one thing I am sure of, the more I learn, the more I am finding that I am ignorant of. Although I spent a career as an educator[xvi], I continue to be a student…and perhaps this diatribe is all just an elongated justification of my belief system, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”[xvii]

Olduvai (aka Steve Bull)

http://olduvai.ca/