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Musings Report 2021-46 11-13-21 We Don't Talk About Collapse To Revel In It, We Talk About Collapse to Prevent It
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We Don't Talk About Collapse To Revel In It, We Talk About Collapse to Prevent It
Those of us who discuss collapse are generally dismissed as doom-and-gloomers, the equivalent of people who watch dash-cam videos of vehicle crashes all day long, reveling in disaster. Why would we spend so much effort discussing collapse if we didn't long for it?
In my view, those dismissing us as doom-and-gloomers hoping for collapse as vindication of our unhealthy obsession with disaster have it backward: yes, some long for collapse as a real-life disaster movie, but those discussing collapse in systems terms are trying to avoid it, not revel in it.
If the system is vulnerable beneath a surface stability, then the only way to avoid negative consequences is to understand those vulnerabilities / fragilities and work out systemic changes that reduce those risks. It's not the analysis of vulnerabilities that causes collapse, it's refusing to look at vulnerabilities because to do so is considered negative that leads to collapse. Why not be optimistic and just go with the consensus that the status quo is so incredibly robust that it is impervious to serious disruption?
Answer: because that blinkered myopia is what enables collapse.
The problem is humanity's propensity to confuse optimism with magical thinking. This confusion is particularly visible in any discussion of energy. The status quo holds that every problem has a technological solution, and doubting this optimism is dismissed as naysaying: "why can't you be positive?"
I consider myself an optimist in the sense that I see solutions that are within reach if we change our definition of the problem so we enable new solutions. I consider myself a pragmatic optimist because I understand from life experience that systemic solutions might require arduous transformations that will demand great effort and sacrifice. In many cases, this process is mostly a series of failures and disappointments that are the essential lessons in a steep learning curve.
But little of this basic awareness is visible in media descriptions of "solutions."
Thus every advance in a lab somewhere is immediately touted as the solution: algae-based fuel, micro-nuclear reactors, new battery designs, etc., in an endless profusion of technologies which are 1) not even to the prototype stage 2) cannot be scaled 3) limited to specific uses 4) require the construction of new infrastructure 5) consume vast resources including hydrocarbons 6) are not renewable as they must be replaced every 10-15 years 7) are not cost-effective once externalities are included 8) are intrinsically impractical due to complexity, dependency on rare minerals, etc.
All this "optimism" is actually 95% magical thinking, as the real-world constraints are dismissed or glossed over: "oh, they'll figure all that out."
In other words, throw enough money and talent at a problem ("we went to the moon, so anything is possible!") and it will always be solved in a way that's bigger and better. This is not optimism, this is magical thinking being passed off as optimism. Real optimism is cautious and contingent, hyper-aware that solutions are a dependency chain that only reach cost-effective scalability if an entire chain of circumstances and advances line up just right.
There's another source of confusing optimism and magical thinking: being too successful for too long.
Former Intel CEO Andy Grove discussed this in his book Only the Paranoid Survive: once an organization reckons it has succeeded / has everything necessary to continue achieving success without taking any risks or making any systemic changes, then it's doomed to decay and eventual collapse.
When success becomes the default then all the hard parts of success--sacrifices made, failures mopped up, gambles that didn't pay off and gambles that did--melt away and all that's left is a sunny confidence that somebody somewhere will work out a solution that scales up to solve the problem for all of us: "we have top people working on it--top people!"
Meanwhile, back in the real world, it takes 20 years to get a new bridge approved and built in the U.S., 20 years for a new subway line to get approved and built and 20 years to get a new landfill approved and in use.
We're supposed to make the leap to a renewable zero-net-carbon future in 20 years and we can't even build one new-design nuclear reactor prototype in 20 years, even as we'd need hundreds of new reactors to replace a significant slice of hydrocarbon consumption.
But if you dare to point out this painfully visible discrepancy between the real-world difficulties in getting a single prototype built in less than 20 years and the claim that we're going to transition away from hydrocarbons in 20 years, then you're a doom-and-gloomer, a naysayer who derives some bitter pleasure from shooting down optimists working on marvelous new solutions.
The essence of magical thinking is the belief that the long dependency chain between the idea/lab experiment and a solution that's cost-effective and scales up to serve everyone will always fall into place because it's always fallen into place in the past, and so there's no reason to doubt that all the pieces will fall into place going forward.
This is magical thinking because it has zero interest in the real-world constraints embedded in each link in the long chain. If you bring up any of these constraints, the magical thinking "optimist" is immediately annoyed and accuses you of being a naysayer whose primary pleasure in life is poking holes in optimism. The idea that there might be real-world constraints that "top people" can't overcome is rejected as naysaying.
The possibility that there might be systemic constraints is rejected out of hand because "anything's possible if we throw enough money and talent at it." There will always be a solution / substitute which will be affordable and sacrifice-free.
That all the previous examples of this were enabled by our exploitation of the easiest-to-extract hydrocarbon wealth is overlooked as a footnote.
This leaves us all frustrated. Those of us grounded in the real world are frustrated that if we bring up any real-world constraints--the untapped ore deposits are far from paved highways, far from major river or blue-water ports, far from processing plants, and far from sources of the millions of liters of diesel fuel that will be needed onsite to extract the ores--then we're bitter naysayers who can't bear optimism and success, while the magical thinking "optimists" are frustrated that we're not getting with the program that "top people" and a tsunami of money will solve any problem.
One thing I've noticed is "top people" (actual experts with long experience) are never the ones hyping some new technology as the pain-free affordable solution unless they're paid shills of special interests. Then they hype nuclear reactors as the solution without mentioning the problem of what to do with the waste--to mention one example of "experts" touting self-serving agendas.
In the real world, the hard part is getting every link of the long dependency chain to work reliably and at a cost that's sustainable / affordable. Success comes not from blithely dismissing constraints as naysaying but from accepting that most potential solutions will fail due to issues for which there is no cost-effective, practical, scalable fix.
On a systemic level, this requires questioning whether the system itself has to change if we want a different output/result. If one possible result of the current system is collapse, realizing the system itself must be changed isn't doom-and-gloom, it's problem-solving.
Highlights of the Blog
Look Out Below: Why a Rug-Pull Flash Crash Makes Perfect Sense 11/12/21
The Contrarian Trade of the Decade: The Dollar Refuses to Die 11/10/21
Eight Reasons Scarcities Will Increase Rather Than Evaporate 11/8/21
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Our guajillo peppers have started turning a glorious red and we harvested our biggest stalk of bananas so far.
From Left Field
When the Times Book Review Panned the Classics--Nabokov pans Sartre's Nausea....
The Great Dying: Ireland as a Distant Mirror-- I'm 45% Irish and my ancestors fled Ireland in the 1850s for Pennsylvania and Ohio...
I tried to prove that small family farms are the future. I couldn't do it. -- not in an economy scaled for cartels, no....
We’re Moving. Fire And Money Are Driving Us Away. -- the California story: it's all good if you're rich or bought in decades ago...
The climate war won’t work -- succinct summary of reality....
Big tech’s push for automation hides the grim reality of ‘microwork’ -- b-b-but AI is the future!....
Needed – a new model tin-opener -- as in, a new economic model....
Metaverse, Mars, meditation retreats: billionaires want to escape the world they ruined
Animation: How the European Map Has Changed Over 2,400 Years
Twin peaks: Whether it's supply or demand, oil era heads for crunch time
Byung-Chul Han: ‘The smartphone is a tool of domination. It acts like a rosary’
A.I. Is Not A-OK
I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s 'Shipping Crisis' Will Not End
"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." (Hannah Arendt)
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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