Earth, Cosmos, and the Lump of Destiny

In the succession of nesting dolls I have nested the Economic Liberalism doll within the Industrialism doll.  This is because of the surplus energy afforded to other systems by the industrial which depend on the economy for funding.  In the last post I used the legal system in a functioning democracy to illustrate the cost of these systems with an unknown return on investment, regardless of whether or not it is measurable in financial (money) terms.  The succession then, in reverse order, of the middle three can be understood in this way:  Capitalism is an expression of the philosophical precepts which formed the culture of liberalism and turned surplus capital from industrial production into money.  

Industrialism can be seen as having captured (or harvested) energy for human purpose.  It took the embodied energy of coal and turned it into work in the economic sense.  Coal energy could be focused by machines to perform specific tasks and was capable of moving large masses of stuff much more cheaply than human labor can do, and do it on a much larger scale.  It was cheaper because it was more efficient, and efficiency gains could be measured by how many people or animals a machine could replace.  Over the subsequent centuries, the number of working people and animals that were replaced by machines steadily rose, and is the process called "creative destruction" by economists, the advent of which is widely regarded in economics textbooks as the greatest gift from the Hindu god Shiva.

Economic Liberalism and Industrialism were, for the most part, concurrent streams throughout history.  The Industrial doll was the necessary precondition for Economic Liberalism as we know it today because it provided the physical basis in the form of surplus capital to be invested in newer, more specialized jobs for the displaced ruralites as well as for the construction of liberal institutions in the cities.   For those who tout human innovation as the prime mover of this particular march of history* would do well to consider the primacy of industrial production in the development of subsequent economic theory.  Though a historical double helix of feedback between economic theory and industrial production certainly exists, it is not a chicken and egg problem.  Rather, economists put the cart before the horse in their history.  This is at the heart of the economist's delusion and why their forecasts of the future should be regarded as delusional.

The reason, as I've said before, is the concentrated energy that could be used to do physical work that is at the root of economic value.  Without it, economic specialization doesn't occur, large factories don't get built, cars don't get invented, and most of what the modern life has at its disposal does not come into being.  If Britain hadn't been blessed with abundant coal, then it would have run out of trees sometime in the 18th century, and, in fact, it more or less had run out of trees.  Coal was a second option that proved to have superior energetic qualities.  Economists coined the process "substitutability", a mythical process based on the ignorance of natural limits.  A glance at Britain's rise and fall as a coal producing nation really puts an end to the idea that natural resources can be replaced once they are gone.  What can replace coal?  China may provide an answer but, the way things are going there, I remain skeptical. 

And this, at last, takes us to the Earth doll.  Where industrial production meets the Earth and what it means for all the other dolls nested within it is the piece provided by the scientific inquiry begun in the seventies at the latest.  This is where the economy is cast as an energy system that must follow the laws of nature.  Human civilization, however you want to define civilization, is wholly dependent on the Earth.  Escaping the Earth, however desirable that may become, is not a reasonable option due to natural laws that extend well past the confines of the Earth.  We have been fed this techno-cultural delusion for the better part of a century now and it will only serve to add to the bitterness of disappointment when people generally come to terms with the dream's suicidal downside.  The Earth is the only accessible place to live.  I am strongly of the view that we should think of it as such.


*It is certainly warranted to highlight innovation as a main feature of the human skill set.  I have no quarrel there.  Chimpanzee innovation, for example, has been largely a dud and not worth investment capital.  It does not follow that human innovation can overcome all obstacles, which is born out by the historical record.

Below is a good introduction from the seventies to a more sustainable space exploration grounded firmly in Cosmic Law.

The Art of Choosing

So then, is it justifiable to include economic liberalism into the Nesting Dolls of Failure series?  Liberalism, economic or otherwise, is a very old and well-established set of beliefs, values, and assumptions that the western world has developed according to for over two centuries now.  They have been very successful centuries at that, and to think such a longstanding system could for whatever reason not function, collapse, and disappear from history seems like a stretch to most people, to say the least.  But to think about this sort of thing as an either/or proposition precludes a lot of good, ponderous fun and can instead lend itself to a lot of argumentative idiocy.

The phrase "argumentative idiocy" encapsulates very well the political situation in America, and probably others in the West, and serves well as an augury for the kind of collapse scenario I think is likely.  As the embodiment of the liberal experiment, American democracy appears very unsteady at the moment.  Others happen to be watching.  Vladimir Putin, for example, is watching.  Alongside the dysfunction of the institutions of democracy is the inability for the U.S. economy to export enough monetary mojo to the rest of the world to keep the America centered global system running.    One of the most inconvenient aspects of being a global hegemon in the modern world with a liberty and prosperity focus is that others (people or nations) feel they need to benefit from it.  What they, friends, enemies, frenemies, out their in the world see and hear from the mouths of elected, or unelected, officials in the U.S. is very likely both disheartening and heartening, depending on which one you are. 

So the twin abstract branches of liberalism, economic and political, are approaching full failure mode as is evident in the sclerotic behavior of its institutions and is a serious factor in the breakdown of global order.  A big reason for this sclerosis is the failure of the American imagination to think beyond the number two in determining how many positions it is possible to take.  Now, I'm as big a fan of the number two as anyone, but there are many other numbers of equal interest.  American politics is beholden to the number two to its detriment, and there's not much that can be done about it at present.  But thinking beyond "two" is a good and fruitful adventure and that is where this little essay is going.

Liberalism, as I said in the first paragraph, is a set of values, beliefs, and assumptions.  You could add to or tweak that as you like, but the main purpose of repeating that statement involves the number two.  This is what navel gazers call "the one and the many" problem.  You have a set (one) of beliefs, values, and assumptions (many) that formed, evolved, and developed (many) into our current system (one).  This one system has many smaller subsystems that interact with and feed back into the whole system.  Some of these systems are very localized and could operate independently of the larger system, or survive the collapse of the larger system.  Likewise, in the realm of culture, which is the habituated interior system of values, beliefs, and assumptions which people in the culture accord with, these things, concepts, ideas, can endure long after.  At the same time, many things people do in the present won't make sense later if underlying conditions render something untenable or not worthwhile. 

A kind of big example which might illustrate this is the fate of the idea and practice of free market capitalism.  Free market capitalism is both a beacon of policy as well as constitutes the rules of the road for economic behavior.  It is also the foundation for codes of behavior for individuals involving ideas of fairness and the social good imbibed by participants.  Across the whole spectrum of business owners is the pull of the logic of business which is in concert with the idea of free market capitalism but is not identical with it.  The many small scale business relationships that forms the web of the whole don't necessarily scale up to the grand scale of relationships that forms free market capitalism.  A local tire service center operates very differently from Abercrombie and Fitch.  It's nature changes somewhat.

Democracy has its own scale issue.  Democracy as a set of values and as a practice can scale up fairly well and once upon a time American democracy worked pretty well.  And, in a way, it still is working, just that, well, it isn't.  The scale issue with democracy I have in mind is the cost.  It is expensive to have courts of law, to enact inefficient standards that have little to no monetary return value but improve the quality of life, or that address fairness, or some other moral good that people generally want.  Large scale entities are more expensive, you could say, by nature.  They tend to be more efficient but they cost more.  It's not really news that the cost of the American enterprise has really gone of the rails.  In a serious crisis in which it may be urgent to direct resources where they are "needed", or where some powerful entity might appropriate resources and allocate them as that entity sees fit, then some other, weaker entity might have to go without.  That the U.S. federal budget deficit has a very large number with a minus sign before it means that eventually difficult choices (many) will have to be made. 

The U.S., the West, the rest of the world face a crisis of scale.  This is a scale that cannot be maintained and will scale down inexorably.  In the broadest sense, then, the one system breaks and many other, smaller systems emerge.  The choices people make and can make regarding their circumstances will involve values they possess at the time.  A process of weighing what is more, less, or possibly valuable will run in accordance with available resources (many but fewer, or less) and the habits of culture.  Americans, Earthlings, will have different notions about how that happens.  America (one) may decide to blow cash and resources in a long shot to kick Russia out of Ukraine in classic proxy war fashion.  But Americans (many) may wish to see this as a choice with multiple options, each affixed to some harsh realities, yet could at least weigh the costs of trying to save the One Big System at the expense of some better, saner possibility.