Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Foiling Optimism

This blog here is the re-ignition of a previous blog which I abandoned long ago for the simple reason that I didn't know what to do with it.  Was it pedagogical?  Demagoguery?  Rhetoric?  I didn't know so I quit.  Since it appears that I learn from things I have determined a dialogue is what is most desirable.  Dialogue, through the medium of the comments section below, is what I hope will stoke the fires of the mind to a blaze which courses through the society in a frenzy of creation and destruction.  Failing that, a more modest aim is to join in the ongoing kulturkampf over the likely direction of future history.  I encourage anyone who reads to join in with comments, opinions, relevant facts, and perspectives, links to relevant facts, perspectives, comments, or opinions, all of which have to do with subjects raised in this blog.  Subjects include:  Finance, Economy, Spirituality, Resource Depletion, Technology, Nature, Ecosystems, Sustainable Living, Philosophy, History, Government, Geopolitics, Politics, Localized Living, Complexity, Ideology, and whatever else you think I forgot to mention.  The idea is to build a narrative about the present around the prospect of collapsing global systems.  Even people who don't believe this are invited to comment and try to convince me that I am wrong about these things. 

With that in mind, I have some points I want to make.  First of all, the title of this blog, Inflection Point, means the upper most point in an arc at which it starts to go down.  I apply this linear arc to the energetic/ economic nexus of industrial civilization, with the point very firmly being that it will go down starting about now.  "Foiling Optimism" about this system is a part of the purpose of this blog.  People generally see optimism as a good thing, a virtuous quality that one possesses or does not.  If you are a pessimist then you are considered flawed in character; degenerate being one such epithet, a bummer to be around another.  


The central beef I have with this usage lies in that when these are deemed character traits the more useful judging element gets shunted aside. When optimism defines quality of character, then understanding threats becomes riddled with blind spots.  Optimists tend to undervalue threats.  This can morph into cognitive dissonance, and cognitive dissonance can define entire populations. To be a little clearer about my (dis)position, I am pessimistic about the future of industrial capitalism, and am concerned about the very likely outcomes as a result of the failure of this system on a planetary scale.  I consider this view to be properly and reasonably skeptical.  The evidence against this system working long into the future is more powerful than the evidence that it will work out just fine.  That is my thesis, and I will present my case the best way I know how. 

Just to demonstrate that I am not just a dispositional pessimist I will present over the course of the blog ways out of this mess and describe what I mean by "ways out of this mess".  But before that can happen, it's important to know what the "mess" really is.  I will start with an example.



 This article is from a very mainstream publication, Forbes magazine, which is fully and without apology in the optimist's camp regarding the future of global industrial resource intensive capitalism.  At the end of the article, even after it has just described what I consider the consummate end of the era of cheap oil, the author still feels compelled to end on an optimistic note.  What he describes in the article is how bad (negative) the profit rate is on drilling Bakken shale oil in North Dakota.  He even uses the "B" word, bubble, because of land values which, he points out, are falling.

Compare the Forbes article to this.  The Forbes was written in the middle of last year.  The Wall Street Journal article is from 2010. This is a small sample size, admittedly, but the time differential between them and the topics written about tells the story just fine.  Remember not too long ago when the buzz was over "energy independence" for the U.S.?  A time when North Dakota was touted as the next Saudi Arabia?  Of course, that was at the extreme end of the hype but still widely believed, and could be achieved if we didn't allow our inner environmental wimp to get the better of us.  Nobody in the public sphere imagined it would fall under the weight of it's own cost structure, but that's what is happening.  Oil is oil, after all.  It's just a matter of supply and demand.  If somebody demands it, then somebody else will supply it, right?

But demand is limited by the ability to pay, and with oil prices hanging around the $90-100 a barrel range, the Bakken still can't make money for drillers.  It's worth raising the question over whether it can ever make money, regardless of the price.  It may always cost more than it's worth to the economy because the cost of extraction rises with the cost of oil.  Oh, fiddlesticks!

It goes without saying this is a serious problem for American national aspirations.  And this seems like a good place to revisit the optimism/pessimism frame for how people generally view the future.  The default position for most people is optimism. If you polled people on whether they considered themselves optimists or pessimists they'd pick "optimistic" probably nine out of ten times.  But this is too vague to be really useful except to psychologists.  If you break down the query into specific items like the economy, or their children's future, the number of optimists versus pessimists would reflect something like a general mood, something useful.  It would also reflect the extent to which people have thought on specific subjects.  People don't have perfect information, after all, and so individual or collective ignorance can be set against what actually happens.  At that point it's possible to judge whether optimism or pessimism was warranted.

Over the course of this blog I intend to describe more fully the thesis stated above.  This post here is really by way of introduction, a sample of how I'm approaching the subject of the times we live in, how we got here, and where it's going.  It's impossible to overstate the magnitude of this subject.  It might be helpful to imagine it as a four dimensional cosmo-historical cause and effect web.  Or maybe that wouldn't be helpful.  Maybe it's enough to say that every subject discussed in this blog is traceable to any other subject.  In the example of the Bakken shale oil, I can link it to any aspect of the economy, which can be linked to technology, to food production, etc., endlessly to about every aspect of life in the modern world.  What concerns me is the web of connections that can be made into a comprehensible narrative.  The narrative can then be planted in the minds of others which, maybe, can temper our emotions and provide a platform for reasonable behavior.  Unreasonable behavior is something to be feared in the context I'm describing.

So please, engage.  If this seems like a worthy activity for you to spend some amount of time on, then you are most welcome to join.  I'll be adding links to interesting stuff over time.  If this all seems scary to you, just remember the immortal words of Ned Stark:  A brave man is brave because he is afraid.


4 comments:

Tim Lindeman said...

While optimists may undervalue threats, pessimists also tend to exaggerate them. When the truth is unknown, at least optimism provides hope.

G of the Forest said...

I'd put it this way: Optimism comes from a reasoned assessment of a given thing or circumstance or outcome. Hope is for when you have no control over the outcome. There are psychological studies that concluded slightly depressed people were the most realistic. Optimism is the human bias, perfectly natural and very useful for survival, but it doesn't mean it can't get in the way of looking at the world realistically. That's really my point.

G of the Forest said...

Another point I'd make on optimism and hope is that people say they are optimistic when they really mean they are hopeful. It's a corruption of the definition of optimism that's leeched into the lexicon. It's possible to be hopeful without being optimistic.

Timothy said...

Interesting point about slightly depressed people being most realistic. Such research must be difficult to prove. Interesting nonetheless. Hope is a pretty powerful force. While there is danger on both sides of the optimism / pessimism spectrum... I would err on the optimistic side myself. Have you ever worked for a company with low morale? People give up pretty easily when there is little hope.