Power and Responsibility

As of this writing, the U.S. Government is dangerously close to defaulting on its debt, which would likely be devastating to a lot of people. The compromises I've heard about are less harmful, but harmful nonetheless. In my opinion, this entire brutal exercise is proof that our political system, like our economic system, has lost a fundamental level of reliability in performing its core mission. This is not because the concept of government is fundamentally flawed, as the political Right would have us believe. It is, like many of the world's problems, because the acceptance of responsibility has not scaled up with the exercise of power.

By “responsibility” I mean an obligation to maintain the life-giving functionality of the systems our actions affect, and accept personal blame or credit for the consequences of our actions on the people and other creatures within those systems. This is as true for organizations as it is for individuals, whether those organizations are businesses or governments. As individuals who are parts of organizations, the increased amount of power that comes from working with others becomes part of our personal power, and our responsibility extends to its use.

In the rest of Nature, responsibility is part of biology: creatures get what they need from an ecosystem in return for innate behavior (filling a niche) that keeps the ecosystem functioning. If they don't fill a niche, they can't survive and procreate. We humans are capable of a wider range of behavior, and therefore a greater amount of control over ecosystems, which we have typically used by reducing their complexity. Effectively, we have simultaneously increased our impact on other species and attempted to avoid our responsibility for that impact. As a consequence, we have progressively degraded the health of the world's ecosystems so that we are now threatening the health of the entire planet, which, if we continue, could ultimately result in our own demise.

The core mission of a government is to provide the basic needs for a functioning society, such as resources, security, and both physical and social infrastructure. Businesses, on the other hand, have a core mission to maximize the economic power of their owners by efficiently providing products or services to the rest of the economies of the societies in which they operate – the equivalent of an ecological niche. Each type of organization serves its own constituents, and has traditionally limited its accepted responsibility to those constituents regardless of their potential for harming others.

In healthy societies, like healthy ecosystems, survival takes priority; and government's mission – where it has the power and accepts responsibility for executing it – supersedes that of business wherever they are in conflict (in an artificial ecosystem like an economy, government enforces the equivalent of natural laws, which, unlike Nature, it gets to change). In unhealthy societies, on the other hand, the wants of the few supersede the needs of the society, making it – like an ecosystem with little diversity – vulnerable to collapse.

In an ideal world built from scratch, we would all accept responsibility as I've defined it. We would learn as much as possible about the way the world works so we could assess the impacts of our actions. To the extent that we couldn't do so, we would create and support organizations that could make up the difference and inform us in terms we could use, while also accepting responsibility for their impacts. Such a world is the only kind I can imagine where total freedom of the sort preferred by ultra-conservatives could survive. In the absence of universal acceptance of responsibility, we are bound to be stuck with something else, which is either healthy or unhealthy; and based on what I've been seeing in the news, it looks like we're settling for the latter.

Getting Unstuck

A growing number of us are stuck trying to maintain what we have while laying the groundwork for a new lifestyle that is more sustainable.  Maintaining what we have typically involves supporting an economy that has become dependent on perpetual and inherently unhealthy growth.  The lifestyle we seek would allow us to thrive without such an economy.  Given this dichotomy, it’s no wonder we’re stuck.

Perpetual growth demands unlimited resources, unlimited efficiencies, or both.  If these conditions cannot be met, the number of people must decrease; but with the theoretical (but totally unrealizable) limit of one person having everything.  If we value life, and appreciate the fact that natural law prohibits both access to unlimited resources and unbounded efficiency, then we must reject the goal of perpetual growth.

The economy’s perpetual growth requirement stems from its built-in rewards for increasing the amount and configurations of resources available to its population.  As the number of “pioneers” seeking these rewards has become large in proportion to the total population, acquiring and consuming more has become the norm rather than the exception.  To reverse this trend (or create an alternative), most pioneers must become settlers – learning to live with a fixed amount of resources that, by necessity, are replenished at a fixed rate.  Given these facts, the goal of “maintaining what we have” must be changed to “maintaining what our environment can afford for us to have.”

Unfortunately, many of us – including our governments, and by extension their citizens -- have already promised to pursue more growth as a condition for basic survival.  This takes the form of debt, which increases exponentially until it is paid off by the rewards of being a pioneer.  A  trivial, and therefore least likely, solution to this dilemma is for creditors to forgive all debt and for everyone to commit to the creation of a more sane economics. The least acceptable solution is for debtors to simply leave the economy, which has already started due to deprivation of alternatives for earning the money they need, and the predations of creditors who value property more than people.  Perhaps the most doable and generally acceptable solution is to make money less usable for consumption or spoiling of physical resources.

The implementation of this last solution would need to be done carefully to avoid some very negative consequences, such as slavery.  For example, society could encourage investment of the money in businesses that are more efficient, or use more renewable resources, or clean up pollution.  This is already being done, but still with the implicit goal of unlimited growth.  To keep from merely delaying our demise, we must choose a limit to how far we will go along this path, and a good place to start is to incur no more debt. 

At the same time, we can join groups (“social units”) where some members focus on keeping the creditors happy while an increasing fraction develop the ability to freely and voluntarily meet each other’s needs with a fixed, environmentally sustainable amount of resources.  Instead of everyone trading with everyone else, groups would interact – peacefully, and with minimal exchange of resources.  Such interaction will ultimately be critical to the process of converting to a fully sustainable world by helping to relocate the world’s population to regions where people can meet their basic needs.

Ecology of Growth

We are imperiled by at least one faulty belief: that it is possible to grow indefinitely in consumption and power, particularly at exponential rates. Long-term survival is at odds with this notion, as biology has proven over billions of years, and mathematics can easily demonstrate. Civilization has translated this belief into an imperative, and developed social and technological tools to spread its adoption and enable the ultimate realization of its inevitable consequences. As a population gets close to its resource constraints, by consumption and degradation, growth becomes increasingly difficult, and what ecologists call “intraspecies competition” results in a diminishing fraction of the population attempting to continue that growth at the expense of everyone else. When the remaining resources become too scarce, those who cannot successfully compete for them start dying off. This is the situation we find ourselves in today, where a small group of competitors are (consciously or mindlessly) wielding the tools of growth as weapons of mass destruction.

Institutions such as governments and corporations are among our most powerful social tools. These tools evolved when humanity arguably functioned as an ecological metapopulation – a group of interacting populations that could help each other keep from totally crashing, or at least ensure that some survived. Our growth ethos has led to globalization, which enables our species to function as a single population, and our tools are adapting to this new reality by achieving worldwide reach in their intended effects and their unintended effects. This would make our entire species more vulnerable even if we weren't dedicated to exponential growth. As a result, we have had large-scale environmental disasters, food poisoning, disease outbreaks (and potential ones due to lack of profitability in the development of new medicines), an economic meltdown triggered by trade of debts as commodities, and death, destruction, and extinction of species caused by our unwillingness to limit atmospheric pollution.

Given these insights, the way to avoid future catastrophe is simple, if extremely difficult. We must once again become a metapopulation, diversify the resources we depend on (relying mostly, if not totally, on those that are renewable and reusable), and cease our pursuit of unrestricted power and consumption. On a fundamental, personal level, this might be translated into two operating rules: Respect diversity, and don't create anything that can't be used by someone or something else.