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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeremy Lent
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October 20 - November 30, 2019
Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela identified a unique attribute of living systems that differentiates them from other self-organized systems. A living system doesn't just self-organize—it actively generates itself, taking energy from the environment to modify itself and perpetuate its existence. They called this process autopoiesis, from the Greek words meaning “self-generation.”
Self generation
In self-organized systems, the complex interaction of many connected elements causes emergent behavior that could never be predicted by a study of each part alone, no matter how detailed.
Unpredictable
in recent decades, the perception of the earth itself as a self-organized entity has become increasingly influential. Scientist James Lovelock was the first to recognize how the different feedback cycles of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land caused a self-regulating effect responsible for the robust conditions for life to thrive on earth through billions of years.
Gaia
Some things can best be understood through a reductionist approach—by breaking them down to their discrete elements and investigating each in turn. Other things—especially what is alive or composed of living entities, such as organisms, ecosystems, and human communities—can only be understood through a process of integration, through recognizing how each part relates to each other and the whole. That is where systems theory contributes to greater human understanding.
System theory
You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kind of satisfied with your products, and then you die.
Wow
The Western dualistic tradition has inexorably separated humanity from a sense of connection with the rest of the world, leaving an underlying sense of meaninglessness.
Meaninglessness
The modern form of cognition has been called “the Cartesian mode” by Fritjof Capra, who reflects that people functioning exclusively in this mode “may be free from manifest symptoms but cannot be considered mentally healthy…. For people whose existence is dominated by this mode of experience no level of wealth, power, or fame will bring genuine satisfaction, and thus they become infused with a sense of meaninglessness, futility, and even absurdity that no amount of external success can dispel.”
The cartesian mode
It is a quest that takes place not just at the individual level but in the structure of our political and economic systems. The imperative for perpetual economic growth, incessantly fortified by the messages of our popular media, has been aptly described as a fetish: the worship of an inanimate object believed to have magical powers. The consequences of this go beyond the sense of emptiness experienced by the privileged minority who are able to afford the newest gadgets. It has created a vast and increasing gap between the wealthy elite and the rest of the world's population, and it is
...more
Wow.main.meaning
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, which implicitly affirmed that, through an effort of will, people could change their lives to experience joy, abundance, and happiness.
Oz
In a bold move symbolizing the birth of the modern consumer, Henry Ford in 1914 decided to increase his workers’ wages by enough that they could aspire to buy their own Model T Fords. The masses now had a dual role to play in modern capitalism: they were to be both workers and consumers.
Henry Ford
We've seen how, at their core, societies are driven by the way in which they have patterned meaning into the cosmos: the ancient Egyptians yearning for ma'at, the Chinese searching for harmony, or the early Christians seeking salvation. In the consumer culture born in the early twentieth century in the United States, the purchase and consumption of material goods became the value that trumped all others.
Consumption of consumer goods
Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew and used his uncle's insights into the subconscious to develop his new methods. “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared Bernays's business partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.”
From needs to a desire culture
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. In almost every act of our daily lives…we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who pull the wires which control the public mind.
wow.Thus a conscious and intellectual manipulation
The money supply, now wholly controlled by central banks, could be increased without regard to any underlying commodity. There was, however, one important catch to this newfound freedom of money. It was now created as a form of debt, requiring a promise to be paid back. As such, the money supply had to keep growing to service the interest on the debt, making perpetual economic growth a necessity to keep the entire system running.
Why it requires constant economic growth. finger strokes creating money from nothing.
In a leaked 1992 internal memo on pollution, he expressed the view that “a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable.” This chief economist was Larry Summers, who went on to serve as secretary of the treasury in the Democratic Clinton administration.
Pollution memo.1997. Larry summers
At our current rate of energy usage, it has been calculated that our world is going through about fourteen thousand years’ worth of that fossilized sunshine from the Carboniferous age every day.
Fossil fuel.four thousand years' worth per day
Like aquifers, topsoil naturally regenerates itself, but at a rate of about a centimeter every two hundred years. Meanwhile, in the United States, we are using it up at ten times the rate of replenishment; in Europe, seventeen times; in China, fifty-seven times.
Aquifers and topsoil
A frequently cited example is the QWERTY keyboard, which was originally designed for its inefficiency in an attempt to slow down the rate of typing and therefore prevent early typewriter keys from hitting each other. More efficiently laid-out keyboards can double typing speeds, and yet it has been impossible for them to make inroads because everyone is used to the older, inefficient design.
Qwerty. keyboard. Interesting
in the arena of geopolitical rivalry, the power of a nation relative to others is substantially based on economic strength. Leaders fear that if their nation unilaterally chose to reduce its own growth to a more sustainable level, this would reduce its ability to protect its national interests.
Exactly. It can't be a unilateral activity
When the framework of modern economics was developed in the eighteenth century, it seemed reasonable to view natural resources as unlimited because, for all intents and purposes, they were. Economists therefore treated minerals, trees, and water as commodities to be sold at a price that was simply the cost of extracting and marketing them. As we've seen, the experience of the past fifty years has proven that assumption to be wrong.
Economics reasons
The measure of GDP goes from being merely bizarre to dangerous for humanity's future because of the fact that metrics have a profound impact on what society tries to achieve.
GDP.we get what we measure
“We get what we measure. The indicators we choose to define success become the things we strive for.”
When researchers applied a measure known as the Genuine Progress Indicator to seventeen countries around the world, they discovered that although GDP has continually increased since 1950, worldwide GPI reached its peak in 1978 and has been declining ever since.
GPI.GENUINE PROGRESS INDICATOR
In countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, GDP per capita skyrocketed after World War II, yet the reported life satisfaction of their populations remained flat. This is called the “Easterlin paradox” after the scientist who first discovered it in 1974.
Easterlin paradox
This effect has become known as the “hedonic treadmill”: no matter how affluent people become, they continually compare themselves with others in their peer group and always desire more. In our globally interconnected world, the standards people compare themselves against are no longer exclusively those of their local peer group but those of the global elite whose images are continually thrust into their presence. The global “hedonic treadmill” is getting ever faster and broader.
Deonic treadmill. Growth and comparison
With the advent of “consumptionism,” capitalism instilled an intoxicating new purpose into people's lives, promising them that their feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness, or alienation could be cured through the possession and conspicuous use of manufactured goods. No matter that the “cure” was only temporary: through hard work and dedication, you could earn more money to purchase even more goods, thus stepping on to the hedonic treadmill.
Wow. Main
Those fortunate enough to possess more money than others gain more in the short term on the treadmill of temporary satisfaction. However, the ultimate beneficiaries are not human at all but rather the conceptual creations called corporations, which exist collectively to transform the human experience and the natural world into the monetized economy, regardless of the ultimate effect on humanity as a whole.
Interesting. The final winner is corporation
We've seen that, beginning with the “mind-cure” movement of the late nineteenth century, a consumption-based ideology served to redress a lack of meaning in people's lives, replacing an inner void resulting from the uniquely Western mode of dualistic cognition with the consumerist frenzy of capitalism.
Main
in our mainstream modern value system, the separation from the desacralized natural world—created by the Greeks, systematized by Christianity, and endorsed by reductionist science—is complete.
Complete separation.main
It was the first integrated model of the entire globe, and it produced some disturbing results, which the team published in 1972 in the book Limits to Growth. It was a little book, but it had a big impact, selling twelve million copies in more than thirty languages.
Limits to growth
Innovations in fields such as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology catalyze each other to create ever more opportunities for further breakthroughs, offering potential for dramatic transformation in virtually every aspect of human experience.7 All this leads to a general consensus that, no matter what shape the future takes, it will be fundamentally different from anything we've known in the past.
No way to stop this tech trend
For ecosystems, human societies, and other complex systems, like the Wasa, the critical transition from one state to another frequently happens suddenly and unexpectedly.
Unpredictability
The resilience of a system determines whether it can withstand big shocks or is susceptible to collapse from a small disturbance. Resilience can be understood as the capacity of a system to recover from a disturbance. But recovery doesn't necessarily mean remaining the same; the most resilient systems are often those that are constantly adapting to changes in their environment.
Healthy systems adapt
after the first easy pickings, the next steps in the society's growth become more difficult and costly, offering more miserly returns. At a certain point, the society's return on investment in complexity peaks, and it finds itself spending increasing amounts of resources for ever more meager returns. In effect, as the society gets more complex, it finds itself having to run harder and harder just to stay in the same place.
When it gets harder and harder
By the first century CE, the Roman Empire had expanded so far that maintaining it was draining Rome's wealth, while new territories were becoming increasingly difficult to conquer. Rome's return on investment in complexity was turning negative. How did its leaders respond? By gradually debasing Rome's currency, the denarius, by reducing its silver content with copper and thereby artificially increasing the money supply. With this strategy, Rome's leaders essentially kicked their problems down the road for later generations to deal with.
Rome's strategy. draining the future
“Jevons paradox,” which shows that whenever technology makes the use of a resource more efficient, this only increases its use, as consumption goes up to exploit the new efficiencies.
Whether we consider language, music, or the internet, it's hard to argue that these have reduced our individuality. On the contrary, each has permitted us to develop and express our individuality more effectively. From this perspective, it's reasonable to see the emergence of a human superorganism as something that could profoundly enrich, rather than detract from, the intrinsic experience of being human.
Connection doesn't mean lack of individuality
Based on the predictions of experts quoted in this chapter, it's reasonable to expect, by 2050, a young, affluent, urban couple—let's call them Cameron and Jude—to be planning their genetically optimized offspring while communicating their thoughts and feelings to each other in an enhanced form using neural implants.
Lol.main
In our current world, two important threshold effects are the exponential progress of technology and the ever-widening global wealth gap. There are also two major sledgehammer effects: climate change and the depletion of the world's natural resources.
4 effects
“recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” These words, from the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
UN
When a cognitive system enters a release phase, this means that beliefs and values held implicitly through people's lives begin to be questioned. Structures of meaning begin to unravel. People's patterning instinct drives them to seek a new pattern of meaning to replace the old one, leading rapidly to the renewal phase, when the future is up for grabs.
Release phrase
There are Traditionals, who uphold socially conservative values, girded by strong religious beliefs and nostalgia for the past.
Type
There are Moderns, comprising roughly half the population, whose values closely align with consumer-driven mainstream culture, prioritizing personal success and financial gain and embracing a modern urban lifestyle with the latest technologies.
Type2
Then there are Cultural Creatives, who value ecological sustainability, accept other cultures, and are concerned with issues relating to the quality of life—both their own and others'—such as healthcare, education, and self-actualization.
Type3
The number of people required to create that tipping point is surprisingly small, if they're truly committed to the new paradigm. Political scientists have studied the history of all campaigns across the world since 1900 that led to government overthrow or territorial liberation, and they've discovered that no campaign failed once it achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population.
Interesting.number of supports required to create tipping point.
Our global civilization is on an unsustainable course because the meaning we've derived from the world has historically been based on disconnection. Beginning with the dualistic conception of human being and cosmos in ancient Greece, Western civilization (more recently becoming global civilization) has followed a path of cognitive separation. By prizing reason over emotion, splitting human existence into mind and body, and then defining humanity only by its mind, we set the cognitive foundation for the scientific and industrial revolutions that transformed the world.
Main
In our relationship to the external world, we pursued a similar path of disconnection, finding meaning in transcendence while desacralizing the earth, creating root metaphors of nature as an ENEMY TO BE CONQUERED and a MACHINE TO BE ENGINEERED.
M
