SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 2016: NOTE TO FILE

The Ecolate Message

A Timeline

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: AND THEN WHAT?, FROM THE WIRES, SYSTEM OF ENOUGH

Abstract: Those showing evidence of 'Thinking in Systems' have been a minority, at least since empire-building began about ten thousand years ago. Control SYSTEM serving educational sub-SYSTEMs, formal and informal, in complex empire-building societies tell growth (and elite) serving narratives that are humancentric. But as Laozi notes, 'True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true.' A list of the not so feel-good systems storytellers (to we Third Peoples), in chronological order, is offered.

TUCSON (A-P) — Love and understand:

[The early ecolate came to be called the 'E.O. ones', mindless followers of the ecofascist
anti-human E.O. Wilson who advocated for merely a Half Earth for humanity.
The EOs came to accept the term but translated it as 'ecolate ones'.
Civ 4.x would be transitional, likely taking 8-20 generations by following the prime directive:
each generation must objectively become more functional than the last to become Civ 5.0
containing humans who can understand the planet and live with it properly (to persist).
It's been a long way up as it will be down, see full graph.]

System (as Nature) over SELF (as illusion)

The ecolate message timeline

The rise of overcomplex societies selected for humancentric/egocentric narratives that climaxed in the late 20th to early 21st centuries. Some resisted assimilation. Those having 'ecolate' (naturcentric, systems science literate) concerns include:

Understand: Seneca, Malthus, Lloyd, Mill, Darwin, Wallace, Lotka, Soddy, Scott, Cottrell, Hubbert, Boulding, Mishan, Hardin, Bertalanffy, Ehrlich, Bartlett, Odum, Georgescu-Roegen, Meadows, Daly, Harrs, Tainter, World Scientists Warnings, Kaczynski, Diamond, Latouche, Hall, Klitgaard, Wilson, Rees.

Love and understand: First Peoples, Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Carson, Abbey, Schumacher, Christian, Suzuki, Elder Brother's Warning, Aluna Message, Washington.

All the above: marginalized by the intelligentsia of the Growth Hegemon as their narrative of system over putative SELF!, of enough is enough, is not consilient with SYSTEM! over self, or MORE! so all can get richer as members of the SYSTEM that firmly supports PROGRESS and DEVELOPMENT at ANY cost as material wealth/GNP consumptive growth without limit. That this narrative can still be believed in by most (and their intelligentsia) is what keeps the SYSTEM going (along with unsustainable high energy inputs and denial).

System over SYSTEM

The current techno-industrial SYSTEM is one of profit (acquisition) and loss (cost/waste/harm) in which profit is privatized and costs (e.g. pollution, illness, harm) are commonized as much as possible. The functional difference between capitalism and communism is rhetorical, which is to say, both are growth SYSTEMs pursuing the same end. When Khrushchev asserted, "We will bury you!" he meant economically by growing faster than the capitalist West. Pure (non-existent) capitalism would privatize both profit and loss, while pure (non-existent) communism would commonize profit and loss (unmanaged commonism). Socialism privatizes profit (but don't tell anyone) and commonizes loss, and both capitalism and communism soon become functionally socialist (but don't tell anyone). Commonism, commonizing profit and loss, is alternative, but if unmanaged, always has a tragic outcome, forcing any would-be commonist growth society (having more than 100-150 members) to become socialist. The current global SYSTEM is socialist as commonizing profit would not allow for economic growth. Commonizing profit while privatizing loss would not grow the economy either.

communism
noun
a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.

naturism
noun
a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by nature, of which the 100th human generation will be part, hence incompatible with perusing the contingencies of the short term human interests of each generation which both capitalism and communism select for, being human centric with a focus on short-term self interests (socioeconomic-political).

Alternative is a closed (except to energy), no growth, largely egalitarian (0.8:1 to 1.2:1) rationing system using mostly solar input for needed energy, no net profit, no elite material wealth, where the system is managed to minimize production and consumption to provide for needs rather than manufactured wants (managed by-the-numbers Natural Law commonism). This alternative would be sustainable (function long-term [>1,000 years]) and be prosperous enough—other than no one dies with more than 1.2 times as many toys than another.

The acquisition/waste growth SYSTEM assumes an open, illimitable frontier/commons. Consuming the planet has a short-term payoff, and some may be laughing maniacally to the bank (e.g. 99% of Americans including those getting free food from the Food Bank), but a reasonable guess is that the SYSTEM, the Euro-Sino Empire, will peak somewhere between 2030 and 2070 (~95% p?), and will transition or humans will go extinct (maybe p=10% in next 100 years). Transitioning now to managed commonism (a managed commons benefiting all life) would minimize the rate of extinction, that of myriad species which could include humans.

The Feudal SYSTEM, based on the ideology of God's Mandate (divine right of kings narrative), was replaced by Growth's Mandate (the ideology of the cancer cell) and the techno-industrial Growther SYSTEM, which, if hu-mans are to live long and prosper, needs to be replaced by Nature's Mandate (as understood via best guess of those who listen to Nature). The current Growther SYSTEM (of EVERMORE!) cannot be tweaked/reformed into its opposite (Nature's Mandate, a society of enough—enough humans having enough per capta consumption supported by enough appropriate low-energy technology). So down with democracy, up with naturocracy.

Timeline of human population growth

'...the second law of energetics [applies] to all and any action and in particular to the totality of human actions.... All energies are not ready for this transformation, only certain forms which have been therefore given the name of the free energies.... Free energy is therefore the capital consumed by all creatures of all kinds and by its conversion everything is done.... Do not waste any [potential] energy, make it useful'. —Wilhelm Ostwald 1912

'In every instance considered, natural selection will so operate as to increase the total mass of the organic system, to increase the rate of circulation of matter through the system, and to increase the total energy flux through the system so long as there is present an unutilized residue of matter and available energy.' —Alfred Lotka, Maximum Power Principle (MPP), 1922. [If a subsystem maximizes empower by destroying the system it is part of (e.g. cancer, modern techno-industrial society), it will not be selected for.]

'The fox knows many things: the hedgehog knows one big thing'. —Archilochus

'Ecologists. . . are hedgehogs. The one big thing they know is this: "We can never do merely one thing." This simple sentence imperfectly mirrors the one big thing . . . —the idea of a system'. —Garrett Hardin

'It will be a race toward either paradise or oblivion, right to the last moment'. —R. Buckminster Fuller

‘The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.... It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and... strange [inecolate] way of looking at its world can endure.’. —Gregory Bateson

Alternative to oblivion: choiceless obedience to the nature of things. Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

We are the environment (e.g. geobiosphere) or we lord over, are 'decoupled' from Nature. Both are not actual. If human subsystems are a small part of a complex planetary life-support system, then what works, what allows a species to persist, to evolve, is not determined by the species nor by choice. Nature doesn't care about your opinions (beliefs). The contingencies of survival follow natural laws in which obedience is linked to persistence as a lifeform. An ecolate narrative is alternative to a political/religious/business-as-usual narrative. Extinction is an option. Human choice is based on preference (opinion), like and dislike, picking and choosing, being for and against—going with what feels good. If one's understanding of Nature is a function of the nature of things, as in determined by without room for opinion, then choiceless awareness follows, for the price of an effort, assuming one would rather know than believe. Serving the system (Aluna) is perhaps our highest calling (the Kogi serve the system as ecolate humans, not the SYSTEM as social control system of human-centric special interests), hence the subsystem of their lives has worked sustainably for 1,100 years. Perhaps we too could/should say NO TO EMPIRE.

The mind clings to its image of the world; we call it real only because of our ignorance. Do not seek after the Truth, merely cease to cherish your opinions. —Jianzhi Sengcan, 6th century CE.

Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know... I was in New York in the 30’s. I had a box seat at the depression. I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We’re doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929–30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it’s not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history... Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered.—M. King Hubbert

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. ―Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. ―Aldo Leopold

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can continue forever in a finite system is either a madman or an economist. —Kenneth Boulding

What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere's handmaiden anew. —H.T. Odum^ref

The solar system matters (maybe): You are a speck on the pale blue dot below as seen up close. Know then thyself.

The inclusion of Theodore John Kaczynski, Industrial Society and its Future, 1995 in the above list was intended to challenge. Some may look at all the other names, know who most of them are, and, from their minority POV, approve most and feel superior to the lesser informed who do not. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is not an ecolate human in terms of his thinking, so his presence, aside from ensuring that 99.9999% of those reading the list will dismiss it, me and my concerns, is problematic. If my willingness to consider what Kaczynski has to say (I even bought and read his Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How 2015 book) is grounds for dismissal, then goodbye. I'm willing to include Kaczynski because arguably his instincts, or intuition, are ecolate. Nature over self. He was raised, like 99.9+% of humans in industrial society, apart from Nature to become a human of NIMH. As a college student, with Euell Gibbons' Stalking the Wild Asparagus in hand, he made his first forays into the non-humancentric world. His talent was for pure mathematics and the SYSTEM encouraged his precociousness. He could have ended up serving as a math professor at Berkeley for more than three years instead of eight consecutive life sentences at the Florence ADX prison. If he had served the SYSTEM, he wouldn't be a person of interest.

That Kaczynski built a cabin in Montana to distance himself from industrial society is not of special interest. That an area he had to walk three days to to connect with pristine Nature was transformed by construction of a logging road that enabled clear cutting is a commonplace business-as-usual story. That Kaczynski sided with Nature and actually did something that could have made a difference is of interest (specifically the 'could have made a difference' part). When another math professor, Herb Silverman, ran for governor of South Carolina to challenge its constitutional prohibition against atheists serving in public office, he received, along with ample hate mail, mail from several hundred other residents of SC who thought they were the only atheists living in the state. For all Kaczynski knew he wasn't the only human on the planet who questioned the value of industrial society and was both willing and able to do something to stop it, i.e. destroy the cancerous too-complex growth society. As a terrorist he did get the SYSTEM's attention, making the FBI's most wanted list. Killing a few people was not going to change the SYSTEM, and wasn't the goal. Having his manifesto published, other than in the Earth First Journal et al. that too few would have read, was the point. If the ship of fools had been turned around, then posterity may have been able to consider his actions justifiable/thinkable.

I confess I admire Kaczynski for trying to do something given his limited means. That there was no forthcoming effective response to his manifesto could not have been foreseen. Professor Silverman founded Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry in SC that is still ongoing with over 150 active members, an unforeseen consequence. Silverman's Secular Coalition has tweaked the SYSTEM, but no foundational challenge or change has been involved such that the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed. That a few hundred high-functioning revolutionaries didn't manifest was unforeseeable. Whether their actions could have done more harm than good, as usual, in the long run is unknown. The claim is that if a degrowth movement had arisen in the 1990's and the growth hegemon stopped, aka industrial society, with humanity transitioning to a prosperous way down, then from the perspective of those in the 23rd century, Kaczynski could have been viewed as a benefactor. If 'going Kaczynski' on industrial society was the answer, then I would. Because of his failure, I consider alternatives. His education was in pure mathematics. Applied math was of no interest to him and so physics, chemistry, biology—all that real world stuff could be neglected. He did develop an interest in how humans lived before industrialization and took a few anthropology classes, but otherwise seems to have had no interest in science, which is inclusive of systems science. When he felt compelled to do something substantial the only possibility known to him was political revolution. His shortcoming was to believe in political solutions. That a Copernican type revolution could undermine the narrative of industrial society likely did not/could not have occurred to him, given his lack of an ecolate education. That he had limits is not the extraordinary claim. That he was one of the few in the 1970's to 1990's to do something that conceivably could have worked isn't either. That there are people who feel superior to him is.

Humans who listen to Nature (the nature of things) and repeat what they learn that most people, often including scientists, can't like or learn to love, are ignored or marginalized/obfuscated/vilified by the intelligentsia if they cannot be ignored. Initial consideration may have been given, but messages having implications that don't feel good and can't be politicized to feel good, fade away. It's a denial thing, maybe a cognitive dissonance thing, as some thoughts make it difficult to serve the SYSTEM with enthusiasm if the implications are factored into one's view of things and one's place in it (and loss of social approbation is at risk if one agrees). A partial list of those who would rather know than believe (in birth order) who have been marginalized/obfuscated/vilified:

Cassandra
Nicolaus Copernicus (for 150+ years, removed from banned book list after 300 years)
Thomas Malthus
Charles Darwin (mostly outside the science circle)79
Charles Bliss 1897
William Vogt1902
B.F. Skinner 1904
Rachel Carson 1907
Kenneth Boulding 1910
Garrett Hardin 1915
John B. Calhoun 1917
Jay Forrester 1918
James Lovelock 1919
Al Bartlett 1923
H.T. Odum 1924
Desmond Morris 1928
Paul and Anne Ehrlich 1932
Stanley Milgram 1933 34
Herman Daly 1938
Fritjof Capra1939
Richard Dawkins (mostly outside the science circle) 1941
Donella and Denis Meadows 1941960
Peter Boghossian 1966

David Suzuki isn't on the list as he is not so much an originator of thoughts people don't like as a purveyor, and perhaps a few others shouldn't be on the list for that reason, or maybe he should be too. Suzuki is known and mostly loved by Canadians who grew up watching him on TV (and vilified by some GNP growthers). They like him, his voice, his look and feel, his eloquence, and they gather to listen and give him standing ovations. Then they get in their cars, drive to their upper-middle class homes acquired by serving the growth SYSTEM (perhaps without stopping to shop on their way home) while thinking their next car will be a Tesla (that will 'peel the edges of your face back' per 2016 ad), or maybe that they should make a donation to the David Suzuki Foundation so they (together) can save the world. They absolutely can't see the implications of what he just told them. David, as a man of science, would rather know than believe. His listeners, the 99 percent, especially the one percenters, would rather believe than know, so denial it is. Wordsmiths add the service of obfuscation. One cannot serve the SYSTEM without some degree of enthusiasm AND prosper in the current Anthropocene, so denial, error, ignorance and illusion are selected for IN THE SHORT TERM to keep the economy growing just as some cancers select for enthusiastic metastatic self growth.

Imagine you are Richard Dawkins. You wake up one morning and you're back at Oxford. But it is the 13th century. The Church (there is only one) is at the height of its temporal power and runs the show. The scholars, and those in training, all serve the SYSTEM, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Dawkins considers giving a guest lecture on 'The God Delusion', it's a British humor thing, but says enough only to show that he is no fool and could be a person of interest. The most erudite and articulate scholar, as acknowledged by all the others, takes an interest in him.

Clever beyond belief, chancellor Merton takes in all the concepts and new words that Dawkins, in the course of six months of taking his meals in private with him, has to offer. Merton soon comes to sound like a modernist, pre and post. He can speak of selfish genes for ten minutes without correction by Dawkins. But he merely adds all the concepts he took in to those he had already mastered. He was Lord High Wordsmith, and his descendants, not surprisingly, resemble him as his ilk is what the SYSTEM selects for.

When he had had enough, had taken the measure of the man, he most sincerely expressed his general agreement with Dawkins and assured him in private that he even agreed as regards the God meme. He kisses Richard on the hand with a nod of respect at their final parting (as Judas had). Indeed, it was with the utmost regret that he had to inform his Fellows that Dawkins was not to be listened to, that he was an unwitting tool of Satan. Dawkins was never seen in the 13th century again (there really is a God, with a sense of humor, and Richard wokeup back in the 21st century). Not a single meme did he pass on because none of them served the foundational meme of God's Mandate. Go to any university today and speak convincingly against the meme of Growth's Mandate (unlike 'Prosperity without Growth' pundit Tim Jackson), and expect to be politely ignored, obfuscated, vilified, or otherwise made to go out of mind.

'So, are you like saying that universities today are no better than Oxford was in the 13th century?' Allow me to clarify: neither better nor worse.

'Our civilization seems to be suffering a second curse of Babel: Just as the human race builds a tower of knowledge that reaches to the heavens, we are stricken by a malady in which we find ourselves attempting to communicate with each other in countless tongues of scientific specialization... The only goal of science appeared to be analytical, i.e., the splitting up of reality into ever smaller units and the isolation of individual causal trains...We may state as characteristic of modern science that this scheme of isolable units acting in one-way causality has proven to be insufficient. Hence the appearance, in all fields of science, of notions like wholeness, holistic, organismic, gestalt, etc., which all signify that, in the last resort, we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual interaction... There is this hope, I cannot promise you whether or when it will be realized - that the mechanistic paradigm, with all its implications in science as well as in society and our own private life, will be replaced by an organismic or systems paradigm that will offer new pathways for our presently schizophrenic and self-destructive civilization.'

— Ludwig von Bertalanffy

'Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.'

— David Bohm,  Wholeness and the Implicate Order 1980. 

'When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,' —John Muir

'The dramatic change in concepts and ideas that happened in physics during the first three decades of this century has been widely discussed by physicists and philosophers for more than fifty years...The intellectual crisis of quantum physicists in the 1920's is mirrored today by a similar but much broader cultural crisis. The major problems of our time...are all different facets of one single crisis, which is essentially a crisis of perception...Like the crisis in quantum physics, it derives from the fact that most of us. and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated world view...At the same time researchers...are developing a new vision of reality...emerging from modern physics can be characterized by words like organic,holistic, and ecological. It might also be called a systems view, in the sense of general systems theory.

The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made up of a multitude of objects, but has to be pictured as one indivisible dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process". What we are seeing today is a shift of paradigms not only within science but also in the larger social arena...The social paradigm now receding had dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world...This paradigm consists of...the view of the world as a mechanical system, the view of the body as a machine...the view of life as a competitive struggle...the belief of unlimited of unlimited progress achieved through economic and technological growth and the belief that the female is subsumed under the male...During recent decades all these assumptions have been severely limited and in need of radical revision. Indeed, such a revision is now taking place...

In science, the language of systems theory. and especially the theory of living systems, seems to provide the most appropriate formulation of the new ecological paradigm. I would like to now specify what is meant by the systems approach...

I shall identify five criteria of systems approach...

1. Shift from the parts to the whole. The properties of the parts can be understood only from the dynamics of the whole. In fact, ultimately there are no parts at all.
2. Shift from the structure to the process. In the new paradigm, every structure is seen as a manifestation of an underlying process.
3. Shift from objective to epistemic science. In the new paradigm, it is believed the epistemology - the understanding of the process of knowledge - has to be included explicitly in the description of natural phenomenon...
4. A shift from building to networks as a metaphor of knowledge. In the new paradigm, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of the network.
5. Shift from truth to approximate descriptions. This insight is crucial to all modern science...in the new paradigm, it is recognized that all scientific concepts and theories are limited and approximate...

One of the most important insights of the new systems theory is that life and cognition are inseparable. The process of knowledge is also the process of self-organization, that is, the process of life. Our conventional model of knowledge is one of representation or an image of independently existing facts which is the model derived from classical physics. From, the new systems point of view, knowledge is a part of the process of life, of a dialogue between subject and object. I believe that the world view implied by modern physics is inconsistent with our present society, which does not reflect the interrelatedness we observe in nature. To achieve such a state of dynamic balance, a radically different social and economic structure will be needed; a cultural revolution in the true sense of the word. The survival of our whole civilization may depend on whether we can bring about such a change. It will depend ultimately, on our ability to...experience the wholeness of nature and the art of living with it in harmony.'

— Fritjof Capra, The Role of Physics in the Current Change in Paradigms 1988

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 1995 

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