2+2=5
Abstract: As Jack Albert pointed out to me, only modern (truly educated humans) can understand (contrary to all evidence and reason) that 2+2=5. Other bits are from a conversation between William Rees and Nate Hagens. I’m maybe 6 minutes into making a readable transcript to consider, so possibly more bits to come.
2+2=5, bitches (I use the “ bitches” meme, so I am among those bitches who have been educated to believe 2+2=5).
Common sense, our genes, the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, inform us, and other species, that if you pick up two apples, but them in an empty bag, and a bit later you add two oranges to your bag, then you have four pieces of fruit in your bag. If you get to the cashier and they charge you for five fruits, you’ll ask for a recount. Corvids, et al., can count up from zero. Nothing extraordinary to see here folks. Humans typically can understand ‘zero’ by age four.
But in Econ 201 class the professor puts the symbol ‘2’ on the board with a ‘+’ followed by another ‘2’. After twenty minutes of clarifying what these symbols mean, an ‘=’ is added. This is a tricky concept being symbolized, one that has taken generations of economists to fully understand. Then a ‘5’ is added.
You know, as everyone else also knows, that ‘2’ is the number of eyes or ears most people have, and ‘5’ the number of fingers on each hand most people are born with. Your difficulty in understanding that ‘2+2=5’ is common, but those who get Nobel prizes in economics, and all who teach the subject in over 22,000 colleges and universities, know that ‘2+2=5’ is one of the great discoveries of modern science (that humans are the only rational animal, one that is different in kind from all life on Earth is another). You don’t quite understand, you’ll keep trying, and as promised, your efforts eventually pay off. You understand, you graduate, you get a high-paying job working to serve the growth hegemon.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair 1934.
If you know what money is, value it, likely have some, then you are a product of and serve the now global monetary culture whose non-viability you cannot understand because your salary, your willing enthusiasm to serve, depends on your not understanding it. The consensus narrative is 2+2=5, and you know it is true because, as everyone knows, you better believe it. Mention is sometimes make of someone who begged to differ (e.g. Bill Rees, Garrett Hardin), and no one ever says what happened to them (a wry smile and roll of eyes implies), as some consequences are unspeakable, horrible beyond imagining. You just know that you know the truth of 2+2=5. It is written (somewhere).
You know that the concept of “carrying capacity” applies to animals, but not humans, that Julian Simon won his bet with doomster Paul Ehrlich in 1980, and that as Simon assured all right thinking people in 1995, “We now have in our hands — really, in our libraries — the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years.”
Some know that doomer Al Bartlett tried to mitigate Ehrlich’s humiliation by using simple arithmetic to show that at a mere 1% rate of growth in the human population for 7 billion years that the number of humans would exceed the number of ‘atoms’ in the observable universe (but he wasn’t so sure about the whole universe). The concept of “overshoot” does not apply to modern techno-industrialized clever-beyond-belief humans, so stop with the chicken-little stuff already.
Humans (modern techno-industrialized ones) are exceptional, uniquely maladapted: We are the only form of animal that tells stories of the 2+2=5 sort and believes them against all evidence and reason. Only modern humans have this ability, so thank the modern educayshun system for all your higher abilities and humanity’s glorious accomplishments.
And yes, we are just getting started (doomsters prattle about “fossil fuels,” and fail to note that there is plenty of energy out there-we haven’t even started to exploit zero-point or dark energy yet-all for the taking in this, our cosmos for the taking). Just take the gobbledygook out of science (and the science out of the gobbledygook) and realize that underpopulation is the problem, one that we can and will overcome to fully realize our Anthropocene potential.
The short of it: You are the product of 50,000+ years of an expansionist culture, a take-and-hoard culture; you know that the civilization you serve, the one true civilization in all its forms (the backward San, and maybe Kogi, being the only exception), the one that your existence and way of life depend on, is the meaning of it all. The expansionist (growth) economy (whose “bread” you eat) will climax this century. You will sing its song of 2+2=5 until you can’t.
Welcome to the Anthropocene, and enjoy life while you can (but, being properly educated, you already know to do that, so never mind and it don’t matter).
Could modern humans renormalize? Of course, all we need to do is:
- Realize that we are the product of 50+k years of an expansionist form of human in the making, an adaptive and dissipative (but not evolvable) invasive plague species that, after taking an area, typically fails to renormalize (e.g. the first Tikopians, Melanesian expansionists, who were forced to live like renormalized humans for 2k years until conquered by racist Polynesian expansionists 1k years ago who were forced to renormalized, but who again expanded when the possibility arose, such that following the coming of Indo-European expansionists in 1606, there are now six times more Tikopians than there were in the early 20th century, though 5/6ths live off of Tikopia on other islands where it is easier to import foods).
- Realize that overcomplex society (community size in excess of 50 and number of frequently interacting communities in excess of 50 within a biome, i.e. Pleistocene norms) from empire building chiefdoms to nation-states to global monetary culture, is not a remotely viable dynamic or form of civilisation.
- Realize that we are all products of an education system that failed to reform itself in the early 20th century when it was evident that we were in “a race between education and catastrophe” [1920], to form a New Education system [outlined in 1933].
- Realize that our meta-problem of overshoot will have rapid depopulation and contraction of the human enterprise as outcome (intended/managed or not), the condition that we should consider seeking out now as it is the one that will come anyway [H.T. Odum, Energy, Ecology & Economics, 1973]
- Realize that to renormalize means to listen to Nature who alone has all the answers, i.e. not to primate prattle including the voice inside your head (while awake and sleepwalking) telling you to serve the world socioeconomic-political system (or pretend not to, e.g. by watching Reverend Billy & The StopShopping Choir).
- Realize that if a human’s mouth is moving (for fingers typing) the first and likely only question you need to ask is, “are they endeavoring to listen to Nature?” as otherwise they are distractions; there are a few humans who do so endeavor, whose words, words, words, are to consider, but under penalty of death (posterity’s), don’t believe anything they say, but only ask, “is this what Nature is trying to tell us clothed apes who have little better chance of understanding complex systems than a dog has of understanding calculus?”
Epilogue: I’ve given expression to a similar vision before, one inspired by George Orwell’s room 101.
Originally published at https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com.