One of the funnest and most endearing features of the human mind is the imagination. It alone, as an extension of the ability to abstract, makes the human mind a flexible instrument of survival which enabled us to out-compete every other species over the millennia. We also derive pleasure in the exercise of the imagination in art, drama, music, myth, religion, etc. which help make the world comprehensible and fortify the psyche against the uncertainties of life and the certainty of death. But the imagination is also a tool for rational thought, and in this way, science and math have in their making an imaginative component. The reason is because the imagination allows us to devise a probability to expound on and to then intuit a possible explanation. The rational proof comes after this.
There is a feedback loop in the brain which you could call learning. Rational thinking becomes the bedrock for the intuition and feeds the imagination. If rational thinking fails to inform the imagination the outcome is a badly conceived version of reality and the intuition fails to anticipate real world events. Without good information the imagination becomes just a means for escape, which, to be fair, serves a psychological purpose as well. But escapism comes out of either a lack of control and/or a lack of knowledge, both enduring conditions of life. Then Godzilla shows up periodically and wrecks everything, forcing people to turn from escapism to actual escape.
Godzilla, in this case, represents the collective worry at the pretty reliable appearance of disaster. Godzilla is an extreme case of this, to be sure, but has its origin in real life experience which makes his popularity understandable. It's best to look at Godzilla as an industrial myth. He is a god of destruction born of the advent of nuclear weapons. The first Godzilla movie was released in 1954 and his manner of pulverizing Japanese cities reflected the then recent experience of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Over the decades the Japanese people have learned to live with fictional Godzilla ever looming, as they have had to with the actual disaster which inspired his creation.
For the average Japanese, the atomic bombing was a random event. It was as random as an earthquake or a tsunami. This is the type of disaster, different as they are, that is expressed through Godzilla. But the atomic bomb attack wasn't random. Japan was warned beforehand and given an ultimatum, but the average citizen had neither control nor information that it was coming and therefore it appeared random. This is a crucial difference. Everything has a cause but the cause isn't necessarily known. One of the benefits of the modern world is that the knowledge of the workings of the natural world gives at least an explanation for things without recourse to the supernatural. But a key difference lies in the origin of the disaster. The nuclear disaster embodied in the Godzilla myth is of human origin.
What humanity confronts now is the prospect of systemic failure. This comes in two related forms. One is what could be called the biophysical system, or the natural system of life on Earth. The other is global civilization, or the interconnected human system of nations, economies, and culture. Civilization is just a part of the biophysical system and emerged from it via the human mind. Both of these systems are stressed, and when systems are stressed they risk failure. A systems failure in this sense means a fundamental reordering of the dynamics of the system. This all sounds clinical and innocuous compared to failure, but failure is in the eye of the beholder. An earthquake isn't a failure, but it can cause failure of the human system that is affected.
So systems that depend on the stability of a wider system experience failure when the wider system fails. This is the primary concern of climate change. Adding heat energy to the climate system changes the dynamics of it. Looking at past climate records it's easy to see that there have been long unstable periods lasting tens of thousands of years which had a number of different causes. In fact, it's apparent that the contemporary climate, such as it is, has been a remarkably stable period, and it is likely not an accident that, after many, many thousands of years of climatic instability, human civilization was only able to thrive during this time. Call it luck that it even happened at all and I can be sitting here looking at my computer screen. With all that, though, climate is just one aspect of the biophysical system that is under duress. Other aspects are likely to impact civilization before shifting climate does.
The question for the purpose of this blog post is what can be known about the nature of the particular broad based disaster people should be on the lookout for. For starters, it's important to distinguish between data and information. Information is useful to the brain, data is not. Data has to be interpreted. Additionally, not all information is equal. Some of it is bad. Knowing the difference between useful and not useful information takes a lot of effort. Having a frame, a hypothesis, theory, or whatever fits the bill is necessary. Doing this allows you to form a perspective and to compare the perspective to events. Perspectives can change. Looking at current events through the lens of a well-conceived perspective also allows you to interpret these events.
Developing a perspective is as much a matter of determining what isn't important as what is. It's like sculpting a statue in this way. It's all the stone you remove that makes the shape of the statue. Removing absurdities from your perspective is like removing stone to form a statue. A few starter absurdities from my own perspective are: The economy will grow forever; the future will look like the past except better; the Earth is an infinite capacity dumpster. This leads me to a wider perspective: That which is not sustainable won't be sustained. These all can fit into the points I made above about the two systems. The human system of civilization is stressing the biophysical system it depends on and threatens to disrupt and cause both of them to fail. How is it possible to tell whether it will fail or not? Maybe it will only partially fail. Maybe it won't at all and I'm just a Nervous Nelly.
To the last I say: Read the signs. It may come down to the fact that I trust scientific inquiry more than I trust economists and politicians. Or oil executives. Or maybe the more intuitive approach that begins with "infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet" accurately frames a predicament humans collectively face. It's about reading the signs. It may not be possible to know when Godzilla will show up (and really, he won't show up because he is fictional) but that it's possible to know when a system, or interconnected systems, is destined to fail. The stress on these systems is well documented and the cause is understood. It comes from the way we live.
As an addendum, in the spirit of annual New Year predictions, I will make a few of my own. Except these are not predictions. I'm not so foolish and my paycheck doesn't depend on it like it does for an investor. Instead, I'll offer three potential Godzilla moments that I will be watching for in 2015, moments when something major gets wrecked, or, more accurately, causes a "discontinuity" in the normal flow of things. These are not in order of magnitude or importance.
The first likely origin of a Godzilla moment I've talked about plenty already is the ongoing shale oil bust in the U.S. The falling price of oil is a disaster for these producers but the way it becomes our problem is through the financing of it. This has been done by way of high risk debt, complicated hedging, speculative borrowing, and the creation of derivatives. At the heart of it is a gigantic miscalculation of the return on these investments. The collapse of the price of oil represented the Inconceivable for these people. But alas.
The second ongoing event to watch for a potential discontinuity comes in the form of the finances of the nation responsible for the Godzilla myth. Japan is leading the industrial world down the path to post-industrialism. And by this I mean the failure of it, not the transcendence of it. The thing to watch for is the success or failure (it won't succeed) of the gambit by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the attempt to jump start economic growth by flooding it with massive amounts of debt stimulus a la the Paul Krugman method. Japan is at the outer edge of Keynesian style efforts to stimulate growth.
The last potential Godzilla moment begins sometime in the tomorrow range. The election in Greece could bring in the SYRIZA party which threatens to default on it's loans to get out from under the austerity policy imposed on it by the EU. Angela Merkel has stated publicly the willingness to let Greece leave the EU. Nobody's sure where it will lead, but from my perspective, it raises the specter of miscalculation. Is it possible to know the impact of the "Grexit" on financial markets? Maybe. But the prospect of miscalculation seems very likely to me. And miscalculation rears it's ugly head in ways as diverse as warfare, auto purchasing, and polo matches. The risk is there to ignite a calamitous feedback loop.
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