Interactions

 The people in two groups can avoid interacting with each other, remaining in isolation. They each have an amount of habitat (resources that meet the needs of people and other species), and waste (resources that displace habitat).

People in each group can interact with each other, with several results based on the rates of change of people, habitat, and waste. 

COMPETITION: 

Domination – One group dominates the other by killing its members.

War – The groups fight each other, replacing people with waste. 

COOPERATION:

Sum – The groups live together, meeting their basic needs and not changing the amount of people or waste.

Restoration – The groups live together, increasing habitat by having less people and less waste. 

Cleanup – The groups live together, increasing habitat and reducing waste. 

EXPLOITATION:

Consumption – The groups reduce habitat by converting it into people and waste.

Collapse – Habitat is reduced to less than what is needed for people to survive, resulting in mass die-off.

If one group is the global population and the other is the next year’s global population, then mostly consumption has occurred, with very few years of cleanup. Collapse is likely soon.

ABOVE: Example of two groups and results of interaction. Area is proportional to the amount of resources. The amount of people is equal to the needs they consume.

Healthy Is Now Ideal

Two years ago, I laid out a set of requirements for what I called an "ideal world," which in retrospect I could have called a "healthy world." Much of my writing since then has dealt with many of the same ideas, teasing out details, exploring the implications of my evolving model of global variables in the past and future, and sharing personal experiences and expectations that appear to be echoes of each other.

Built into all of it was the hope that some significant part of the population would seize on those or similar ideas and, in the presence of obvious danger, use them as the basis of a way to diminish or escape that danger. The political climate at the time was cautiously reasonable, inching toward awareness and agreement that something major needed to be done to avoid global economic and ecological collapse that was becoming perilously imminent. There remained a chance that the world might succeed in at least delaying that collapse by a few years.

I spent a fair amount of creative energy trying to assess the probability of success. As a trigger for some of that creativity, I simulated people and environments in fictional writing – a tactic that had coincided with previous bursts of insight (most notably in the development of my first novel). My most recent attempt followed a thought experiment in one of my books, and yielded a model of interaction between groups that made some interesting predictions that could be tested; chief among them: that interaction between groups is always destructive to the identity of at least one of the groups through either assimilation or death.

The last election here in the U.S. appears to have rejected global collaboration for mutual survival, and in light of my research suggests that the group most effectively in control of our politics and economy has felt enough of a threat to its identity that it is willing to threaten the survival of everyone in order to ensure its dominance. Use of the word "dominance" is deliberate: my group interaction model defines it as the total control of all resources by one group. Though I haven't as closely studied it, there appears to be a similar dynamic at work in much of the rest of the world. In previous years, this threat might have been dealt with by acquiring more resources and moving people away from each other in order to safely establish group identity ("isolation"); but the world is running out of basic resources, and we don't yet have the ability to settle other habitable worlds – if there are any. Competition will therefore be the driving activity of our future, and competition is the key to dominance.

I brought up the "ideal world" concept again because since the election I have come to a number of realizations, among them that the ideal world I envisioned is in fact what a healthy world would look like, as opposed to the dying world we live in now; and that even if we are beginning the collapse I've forecast and feared, the best we can do is to create pockets of healthy community and environments wherever we can. In future Idea Explorer posts I will dive into what systems engineers might call "derived requirements" for specific situations, and in my other writing (such as Twitter and the Land of Conscience blog) I will explore what implementation looks like.

Evaluating Competition

It seems that here in the United States we compete for everything. This is certainly the case with politics (managing government) and business (managing the economy), which arguably have the the largest direct impact on our lives. Most of us are effectively slaves to the economy, where we must constantly convince someone that we are better than other people in order to survive. Lost in this competition are answers to some fundamental questions:

1. What are we ultimately competing for?
2. Are the winners really "better" than those they defeat?
3. Is the competition worth the cost?

Biologists would say that most competition can be best understood in evolutionary terms, as a selection of mates whose offspring have the best chance of surviving long enough to have offspring. In this case, the net result of the competition defines its goal: extending the collective lifetime of our species as long as possible. The term "better" is more than just a verdict of who wins a particular competition; it is a value judgment, assessing who supports a particular value more than others. If the value is "human life," then the better people are those who do the most to maximize the amount of human life over time. The cost of the competition must be weighed against the results to determine if the competition is worth it, which involves an additional value judgment used to identify what constitutes a "cost." We can most simply use the same value (or values) for both costs and benefits; for example, assessing whether the rules and conditions of a competition will lead to a net increase or decrease in human life over most potential outcomes.

From the perspective of an individual person or organization of people, the primary value is personal happiness, which is intimately tied to longevity, physical consumption, and the assistance of related individuals. Individuals can choose to collaborate or compete, a choice that is determined by both personal predilection (some of us are more prone to compete than collaborate) and the availability of resources (when resources fall below a threshold where everyone can meet their needs and wants, people will be forced to compete with the others to get what they need and want, unless collaboration can increase the amount of resources).

Artificial competitions, such as those between businesses, manipulate these variables by imposing goals, rules, and conditions, and often selecting participants with particular inclinations and abilities, with the effect of (at least temporarily) increasing happiness for those who win and those who support the competitions with resources. Little, if any, consideration may be given to the net gain or loss to anyone or anything else because the values embodied in a competition do not extend to them, unless additional values are imposed by an outside entity which acts on their behalf, or are inherently shared by the competition's participants who are part of an impacted group.

Political competition is perhaps the most critical of artificial competitions, because it determines the leadership of government, whose influence is derived from its function to enforce and support values common to a society, especially the the lives of its citizens, by for example acting as the "outside entity" influencing other competitions. For societies such as ours that have global impact through artificial (abstract and technology-driven) means, the natural large-scale value of human life should be explicitly discussed and accepted or rejected by all citizens on a routine basis; and, if accepted, it must be intentionally integrated into the values that underlie all activities contributing to that impact, especially the governance of our society and how we choose our leaders.

Due to the world's complexity and global proximity to natural resource limits, those of us with significant influence can no longer follow our natural proclivity to increase our happiness, with its attendant and excessive consumption requirements. Humanity has arguably passed the point where significant additional resources are available, and some of us are already using technology and wealth to manipulate institutions like government and business, which enabled our growth, to facilitate the opposite: competition (with unfair advantage) for what is already being used by the rest. Together we need to reexamine the competitions we are participating in, and consciously decide whether the values they serve are in line with the future we want, before that future is decided for us.

Blind Demand

It's well documented (not to mention clearly obvious) that most of us are the targets of psychological and chemical warfare, aimed at getting us to constantly want new things and services; and once we get them, to become dependent on them so the people who provide them can acquire more power. So we can continue to get more, most of us must get jobs, which themselves are things that empower others, enabling us to acquire some power ourselves as soldiers in the use of such warfare against other people.

Because new things and activities require matter and energy, we use more matter and energy, which we take from the rest of the world. Energy can't be reused, so it is lost after we use it. The matter is either reused, stored in forms that cannot be used for many years, or is so toxic that it harms and kills as it circulates through the biosphere. We are so inefficient in the way we get and process matter and energy that the vast majority of what we liberate from the world ends up never being used.

And so the world dies; because other species require some of what we take so that they can survive, and many are killed by the toxins we create. Originally part of Nature's healthy cycle of reuse and regeneration, we have created and eagerly participate in a process that creates waste and death, all for a brief feeling of control which we believe – wrongly – that we deserve, and can exercise without excessive harm to ourselves and the few people we might still care about.

Much of the harm we do comes from great power multiplying the misjudgments flowing from our natural ignorance, fed by a thirst for more power and an arrogant belief that our ignorance is less than it is. We all have "blind spots," gaps in our awareness of both what's around us and the chains of causality that determine the impacts of our actions. Those of us who believe that such blind spots don't exist, or that some omnipotent parent-figure will protect them from the worst consequences of their ignorance, are prone to do whatever they can, limited only by the number of direct restraints they can eliminate.

Common sense suggests it is better to collaborate with people who don't share our unique blind spots, communicating so that we can collectively have a more accurate view of the world, and work together to explore and share perceptions of the reality we aren't collectively aware of. Such collaboration doesn't lend itself well to focused collection of personal power, so the people who desire that power must sabotage it. To do so, they convince others that they have a set of critical insights and abilities that no one else can have or share without depending on them. This fundamental deception is the essence of manufactured demand. When the power-seekers inevitably reach the limits of their ability to meet the demand, they first try to maintain an illusion that the supply really exists, then look for ways to blame others so their fundamental deception can remain. Even if the deception is exposed, the demand is already in place, so someone else will step in to meet it; this protects the self-images of the people who were originally deceived, because they can blame the originator without accepting responsibility for their own weakness.

This suggests that to break the death spiral we are in, we must promote collaboration over competition, knowledge over power. This begins with honestly questioning our most basic assumptions about ourselves and the world around us, and enlisting others to do the same.

We must accept that we are all limited in awareness and ability while trying to increase both; and that this is not intrinsically a bad thing. What is bad is to cause harm or death, or risk doing so by increasing our personal power without exposing and offsetting our limitations to match their potential impact, preferably by working in partnership with anyone or anything subject to that impact.

Never accepting that we know everything we need to know is key to our survival, yet we must temper its acquisition with the costs to other people and other species. We should proceed with a healthy respect for the interrelationships between everything and everyone, whether we are aware of them or not; here is where spirituality can have a positive effect, minimizing damage until knowledge provides surer guidance.

People who hide information, lie, or advocate doing either, should be considered a threat to the general welfare, and treated accordingly until they stop. Those who actively manipulate people into doing things that are unhealthy or potentially unhealthy to them or others need to be exposed and restricted in their ability to do so.

Finally, convincing people to acquire something while providing access to the full set of existing knowledge of its costs and benefits is the only legitimate way to generate demand; where gaps exist, they should be identified. If something is too complex for responsible judgment to be made about whether to acquire it, then it probably shouldn't be acquired – or made.