The Monetary Culture Cannot Turn Into Anything Viable
… i.e. is not a remotely sustainable form of civilization
I follow B, the Honest Sorcerer, who posted an article today making claims of interest, but within a context of politicized concepts that all political animals can only view through a ‘for’ and ‘against’ filter darkly, i.e. fail to understand at all. As Jianzhi Sengcan noted 16 centuries ago, “The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” Or it is the only way arrive at verities need to rule the world. If you believe in politics, read B’s post.
What follows is B’s post, which I foundationally agree with, but without the distractions. I could write an essay begging to differ, quote the parts I can’t sing along with, and argue for a better view, but cutting and pasting his essay and rewriting it a I deem needed will as clearly note my differences, but without repeating distractions.
If a reader has nothing better to do, they could use a word processor, create two columns, paste B’s essay into one, my characterization of it in the other, and identify points of departure. As for myself, I just read the first paragraph and decided to copy and paste so I could rewrite as I read it into a form I can sing along with. All evidence is that 99% of readers will dismiss or hate my version, so odds are you should just read B’s version. His narrative is understandable by political animals. He has 5.9K Followers.
The Monetary Culture Cannot Turn Into Anything Viable
… i.e. is not a remotely sustainable form of civilization
By E, the Dishonest Fraud
The history of our denormalization goes back over 55k years, and overcomplex society (permanent settlements with populations over 150) began over 11k years ago (as evidenced by monument building). But to do it right and rapidly takes urban populations and money, which really made empire building seem great about 5k years ago. It’s been so great that we’ve been doing it again and again, rising and falling like crazy because that’s what money, and the monetary culture that it selects for, make you do.
Go ahead, try to dismantle it, and the crazies will call you crazy. Your Anthropocene enthusiasm will be called into question, and if you ain’t got that bling (the stuff that buys it), you ain’t got a thing (unless you make or grow it yourself).
According to M.K. Hubbert:
‘The world’s present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy [the systems worldview]; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.
‘The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.
‘Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.’
“Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture.” Summary, by M. King Hubbert, of a seminar he taught at MIT Energy Laboratory, 30 September 1981
What is sorely missing from the monetary culture is that the role of technology and energy are misunderstood or ignored, e.g. we think that the problems caused by technology (e.g. the dehumanization of modern humans) can be solved with more technology, and that technology will provide evermore energy, so all we need is more money to pay for more technology.
So where’s that latte I ordered? That’s what I want to know. People don’t need food; they need money to buy food, stupid. Food is energy. Money makes energy to fill mouths, gas tanks, or charge batteries. That’s all you need to know.
Technology and money define the Modern Techno-industrial (MTI) monetary culture. Together they have grown into the hydra head of production and consumption. Lack of foresight intelligence and being energy/posterity blind also defines the MTI form of civilization, i.e. life as you know it. And where’s that latte machine I ordered?
The monetary culture and technology did not create the modern condition of one-off plague-phase overshoot we consider normal (being time blind) and certain to get better and better (being energy blind in one eye and unable to see out of the other, both connected to a brain lacking foresight intelligence).
Our modern growth hegemon wasn’t created by clever apes and their technology empowered by political leadership and a financial system (e.g. that of the Chinese Communist Party in China). We are living the life we deserve because we (recent ancestors) torched off a planetary larder of fossil fuels to extract all non-renewable metals, minerals, while destroying a planetary life-support system (aka biosphere) by turning it into humans, livestock, and pets as fast as possible.
The monetary culture, our MTI train to nowhere (extinction) can never be dismantled/destroyed without abandoning all technology that causes more harm than good (e.g. smartphones, cars, motorized transport, industrial mining/agriculture…). Humans cannot be renormalized as long as they live in groups larger than 50. The pace of planetary destruction will not slow (e.g. the Anthropocene mass extinction event) until the human population is less than 7–35 million.
But don’t worry, there is nothing you can do to prevent a die-off. If you abandon (walk away from) the MTIed monetary culture, the 8+ billion who don’t will keep on keeping on to ensure that depopulation and contraction of the economy is the condition that will come anyway. What you can do is seek it out.
“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, Energy, Ecology, & Economics, 1973
I know that Odum’s view is a Pollyannaish statement, perhaps prompting some of my readers to point out that since our only hope is more technology that I’m some sort of doomer dude, but actually I’m an extreme cornucopian optimist living on an abundant Earth (go to Mars to retire with Musk, but don’t look back).
In perhaps as little as 10 million years, if humans again become K-strategists, Earth’s biodiversity will recover. I think that eventually (perhaps in only 500 years) we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly, a condition that will end the Anthropocene (or humans go extinct and the biosphere recovers). That’s the source of my optimism. [James Lovelock]
Let’s start things off with the expansionist form of human that arose in East Africa some 75k years ago to then spread out of Africa 50k to 60k years ago, i.e. the form we are all descended from (unless your are San, Hadza, or Pygmy). It doesn’t matter where your recent (last 10k years) ancestors are from, they were all part of the Great Human Expansion that led to the Great Acceleration of 1950, the proximal beginning of the Anthropocene (the distal being the Great Human Expansion).
What is woefully missing from this story is the technology which has enabled all this: food storage (via drying, smoking meat or storing grain in container technology). Weapons of mass (e.g. megafauna) destruction (e.g. fish nets, Clovis point and atlatl) didn’t support settlements to form as the although vast numbers of fish or megafauna could be killed when they were migrating (e.g. pike, salmon, elk, reindeer, bison), the condition of large populations being supported at one location was not possible without an ability to store mass quantities of food, or dried/smoked meat (or meat stored in permafrost) and grains/tubers/rhizomes/dried/pickled foods. The condition of denormalized expansionist r-culture humans being able to settle and live in large (>150) groups, is the denormalization condition/dynamic that enabled our loss of a viable form of civilization (K-culture of K strategists).
What is perhaps even more important to note here is that these technologies were — as the late sociologist Lewis Mumford would say — autocratic in nature. Said differently: ships could not have been developed and built without a hierarchical system and without the use of force and aggression. It is perhaps a lesser known fact of European history, but even after the conception of Western kingdoms, the continent was full of indigenous tribes inhabiting many of its woodlands, and living alongside the various states of Europe. Thus before the actual colonization of the Americas could took place, large European powers were already busy exterminating these tribes together with their rich culture, eager to grab their resources: in this case wood suitable for building large ships.
Building — let alone manning — a large sailboat also required a strict hierarchy and a kingdom able to accumulate enough surplus food for both the woodworkers and sailors. None of this was a voluntarily act: men were often forcefully recruited to join ship crews, and food was confiscated from peasants through the well established means of a feudal system. As we can see, the very technology — ships — had already carried the seeds of colonization well before Columbus set sail in 1492. In other words: colonization — and later capitalism — happened because it could (and was selected for), not because someone had an idea to make it happen.
It was in the context of authoritarian technologies used by authoritarian states where capitalism first appeared. Abstractions like property rights (beyond personal property carried in a bag) gave birth to privately owned corporations raising funds for their journeys through selling and offering dividends on their stocks. The immense flow of wealth and raw materials into Europe started to change hands on exchange markets. People made investments in the hope of profits (unearned income). New businesses popped up everywhere, financed by bank loans.
None of this was possible, however, without stripping the massive flow of goods and wealth of their blood stained history. Commodities were named commodities not only to make their price more comparable, and thus easier to trade with, but also to strip them from the context in which they were made. The blood staining Aztec jewelry was purposefully washed away as these intricate pieces of precious metals were melted and shaped into uniform gold coins and ingots. The sweat and tears of slaves working on plantations were erased from memory as soon as the sugar and cotton they produced was poured into uniform sacks. Everything was turned into neat little units of goods without any prior history.
The same process of de-contextualization unfolded on the plantations as well. Plant species, like sugarcane, were uprooted from their original habitats — together with slaves of African origin — and were placed into a sterilized environment stripped from their original inhabitants. There they had no choice but to perform their task: grow profits at low to minimal investment costs. This complete disregard for original habitats and the needs of all species, has yielded a process easy to replicate all across the gl/obe. Kill, destroy, replace, reap. Collapse, rebuild, and repeat.
Without any interest in context on both ends of the process it was easy to forget that all this was a one time boom. You can exterminate and rob a rich culture only once. You can cut down an ancient forest and sell it’s prized wood only once in a lifetime. You can establish only so many slave farms before running out of suitable land.
You can only discover and colonize a second hemisphere only once. After that, there is no planet B.
As one would expect, such a “successful” recipe couldn’t result in anything but exponential growth — at least until limits were reached. Those who warned that this could not go on forever based on a finite set of resources were called names and cast aside. It was just way too profitable to continue plundering the planet — one finite resource after the other. Land. Coal. Oil. Copper. Lithium. The same process was repeated time after time: exploration, killing the inhabitants of the land, extracting a finite reserve, then moving on to the next great opportunity. Limits be damned.
Looking at the essence of “renewable” technologies nothing has changed. In fact, things only got worse. Rare earth metals, copper, silver, nickel, cadmium, high purity sand, steel are all needed in higher quantities due to the extremely low energy density and intermittency of “renewables”. Wind and solar sites must be overbuilt by as much as 4–7 times to reach the same level of output as a coal or gas fired power plant. Mining and the destruction of Nature thus also has to accelerate at a similar rate — or even more if you consider the rapid decline in ore grades. All powered by fossil fuels, of course.
There is nothing renewable about “renewables”. They depend on the same autocratic technologies as the very fossil fuels they aim to replace.
Finally, if you consider that colonizing nations and their allies are responsible for 92% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide emissions and 74% of excess material use, it’s clear that the current ecological crisis is the responsibility of industrialised economies in general and the corporations running them in particular. In this sense the green revolution is but a last ditch attempt to maintain this unhealthy imbalance in power and ultimately the rule of corporate interests, the true winners of colonization.
Capitalism has come about as a natural response to technology use and a temporary abundance of raw materials. It was simply the most effective way of plundering the planet, and thus won hands down every time it was contested. Even its much ballyhooed challengers were built upon its core principles. The way returns are distributed or who makes/owns the productive assets, of course, can be greatly different, resulting in a lower or higher inequality in society. Irrespective of wealth distribution and questions of ownership, however, the essence of every large scale industrial system remained inherently autocratic. As long as the resources for building technological devices (be it sailboats, steam engines, solar panels or Bitcoin) must be expropriated and extracted to exhaustion, the system (e.g. CCP Chinese Communist Party members) will remain the same.
Since the economy, no matter how we name it, is only interested in making a net return on investment, not in the health or well being of humans and the more than human world, it will eventually turn on its own population as its resource base wanes. As long as everything, from raw material to labor, could have been extracted far away from the “bastions of democracy”, people at home were allowed to be free, but only as far as to not hurt business interests. This gave the illusion of progress, or a better life through technology, together with better health, care for the young and elderly or rights for minorities.
As resources grew thinner and thinner, yielding less and less profits though, the system has started to show its real face: autocracy. Modern democracies across the planet have started to turn into a local variant of a soft or inverted totalitarianism. A political arrangement in which corporations exert a subtle but substantial power over a system that superficially seems democratic. Think: corporate donors writing laws, often against the interests of the voters. A complete take-over of the media and the civic discourse. Shutting down dissent and labeling everything but the mainstream narrative dangerous misinformation. Freedom and democracy proved to be nothing but a brief anomaly in this inherently inhumane system arching back to the emergence of the first empires.
Soon, as the debt based everything bubble bursts, governments around the world will have no other choice than to take complete control over the money system, even if it means banning every other form of exchange (bitcoin, gold, or something as simple as cash). By controlling what money can be spent on (and for how long by giving it an expiry date) central governments will have a chance at managing the economic descent downstream from a steady decline in energy production.
Repossessing homes of people unable to pay their debts and turning them into tenants, for example, seems to be another way how the financial superorganism might try to hold on to profitability. You will own less (and less) and be… “happy.” A modest, low energy, low consumption life will be marketed as “green and sustainable” to somehow take the edge of the situation and make acceptance easier. Make no mistake, I do think that lowering consumption is the only way out, but only if everybody does it in a concerted manner. As John Kenneth Galbraith astutely observed, however:
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.”
The ruling class is thus not at all interested in creating a more sustainable system. They have a different motive: staying on top, no matter what. Thus they will take every opportunity during this long emergency to concentrate power, to squeeze out political opponents while trying to maintain the flow of profits to an ever smaller round of donors. Again, a system entirely dependent on autocratic technologies cannot evolve into anything else than an Orwellian dystopia prior to collapse. As soon as energy inputs — maintaining the underlying technology base — fall below a bare minimum level, though, the system will collapse under its own weight.
Moving towards an ever more digitalized (digital ID, digital currency, digital shopping) world is thus an incredibly short sighted way to maintain power. As the electric grid starts to fail in many places (due to a lack of fossil fuel inputs), these autocratic systems will be harder and harder to maintain. As blackouts become more frequent and longer it will be harder and harder to pay at the store or log into digital government services — let alone performing the many BS jobs requiring a computer and a stable internet connection.
At this point the current centralized capitalist and CPP system will vanish sooner than one could imagine. Political power will fall back to the lowest level possible (municipalities, warlords) and real world skills will once again become respectful means of earning an income. The world will become ever more localized, and people will be forced to rely on manual labor to survive. On the other hand, lacking six continent supply chains, they will be also forced to use improvised low-tech — and thus more democratic — technologies setting the scene for a new, more egalitarian world to be built (or not) from the rubble. How many of us will live to see that, what technologies will remain viable, or how long will this take is anyone’s guess… One thing seems to be sure: we have quite interesting times ahead of us.
Until next time,
B
Notes:
For the record: China has also developed ocean faring explorer ships during the 14th and 15th centuries — but much bigger and more sophisticated ones than their European counterparts, expanding trade relations into East Africa and throughout the Indian ocean. Following a change in power, more focus was shifted inwards, on protecting China from the Mongols with the construction and expansion of the Great Wall. The famous explorer Zheng He embarked on his last voyage in 1431 (six decades earlier than Columbus first set sail) and died on his way home. After his demise, explorations were no longer financed, the ships were left to rot or burned in their docks. When China returned to the scene more than a hundred years later, the world has been already transformed by colonialism.
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Modern humans are not rational animals. We are techno-industrialized domesticants who do shit and who have reasons for doing shit… IN THAT ORDER. Our r-culture consensus narrative makes us prefer death to living as normal animals (in the case of humans, as K-strategists), and will select for that unintended outcome.
To understand the remorseless dynamic we are part of and serve is to be delivered from it. You cannot choose to abandon all hope of making MTI train to nowhere work. Understanding the dynamic of the MTI train is to get off (choicelessly) by any means.
The condition of not being delivered is evidence of not understanding the dynamic, therefore endeavor to think well. Believing that transitioning to a K-culture form of civilization is the only viable option won’t work. Seeing (understanding) that what you are is non-viable will choicelessly compel change.
Believing in change, in free will, in agency… prevents change. The condition of believing in belief needs to faulter, pass away, for humans to persist. The alternative mindset to believing is listening to the nature of things (not to humans or the voice in your head).
What if B were to read my prattle, understand, and thereby be forced to tell an altered story? My guess is that he would loose 99% of his followers/readers who would feel betrayed. But the 99%’s belief that whatever consensus narrative they now believe in is true will be betrayed by what is in front of their face, the condition that will come anyway. Better to seek out the condition now that will come anyway than sleepwalk into futurity.
My guess, in fewer words, is that 99% of B’s readers have not met the enemy (would rather believe than know).
