Infinite Improbability and other Puffs of Logic

I was delighted to come across a series of videos on Youtube discussing advanced science fiction concepts.  I'm presenting a few appealing ones here for your perusal.

Infinite Improbability Issues:

Matrioshka Brains:

Black Hole Farming:

Iron Stars:

Psychohistory:

The Collapse of Global Civilization Has Begun

via Medium

Only the fewest today think that global civilization is on the brink of collapse — but it’s doubtful that the Romans, the Greek, the Mayans or the Mesopotamians saw their own fall coming either. We hear about new obstacles on a daily basis; most of the news consist of disturbing stories on increasingly overwhelming issues that, plainly spoken, seem impossible to solve. And yet, no one even recognizes that it is collapse that starts to unfold all around us.

Civilizations are characterized by the emergence and expansion of cities, as the Latin root of the word suggests (lat.: “civis” = inhabitant of a city), that, in some instances, turn into states. A city is a permanent settlement of humans where more humans live than their immediate environment can support. Therefore, the city requires the import of food and other resources from the surrounding area. The use of the term ‘require’ hereby implies that if the rural population doesn’t agree on exporting the product of their work, the city comes and forcefully takes it (Scott, 2017; Jensen, 2006). The city continuously expands as its population grows, requiring evermore resources from the rural surrounding, and therefore depleting an ever-increasing radius of land. Civilizations can, by definition, not be sustainable, since every expansion on a finite planet logically has a limit — and “colonizing other planets” is obviously nothing but science fiction. Earlier civilizations reached this limit after a few hundred or thousand years, but with the advancement of technology we repeatedly found loopholes that allow us to artificially modify conditions in our favor. As we slowly reach the limit of technological, physical and biological possibilities to further expand as a civilization, it is of utmost importance to understand what is happening and why.

If we can learn one thing of the past collapses of major civilizations, it is that all of those showed some (if not most) of the following symptoms during or immediately before their imminent collapse: environmental destruction, depletion of vital resources (such as water, arable soil and timber), famine, overpopulation, social and political unrest, inequality, invasion or other forms of devastating warfare, and disease.

Think for a second. I guess you will be able to come up with a current example for each of the points listed above in under a minute. If not, here are a few examples:

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ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

Virtually every environmental crisis ever recognized as such in the last century has since worsened. All goals set by the Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro (1992), its follow-up Rio+20 (2012), the Kyoto Protocol (1997), the Copenhagen Agreement COP15 (2009), and the Paris Agreement (2016) have failed to make a considerable difference. 

At the latter event, politicians agreed that climate breakdown must be mitigated, and half-hearted promises were made to set utopian goals for a reduction in CO2 emissions. 

No matter what you look at, may it be deforestation, atmospheric carbon levels, species extinctions, polluted rivers, every aspect has gotten worse year after year. Governments doesn’t seem to be able to solve this crisis, and neither is the public. Recently the Global Carbon Project announced that, despite all the efforts and the fact that overall carbon emissions from fossil fuels and industry have experienced only “flat growth” over the last two years (a sign of hope for many), the carbon emissions will once again grow by 2% in 2017 — and the trend is expected to continue next year.
It seems like all our efforts are destined to fail.

Forests all over the world continue to be destroyed in the name of economic growth, progress and development, and we civilized humans set in motion what some call the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. In the past 40 years, we lost half of the world’s wildlife, and species extinctions proceed at an unprecedented rate — estimated at 10,000 species per year (WWF), or about one species per hour.

Simultaneously, the decrease of insect populations across Europe by over 70%, already bearing the label Insectageddon, is believed to have disastrous impacts on human crops and ecosystem stability in the coming decade.

We logged over 75% of all forests in the 10,000-year history of our culture, and logging continues at breathtaking speed (currently deforestation proceeds at a rate of 48 football fields per minute, while we concomitantly lose 30 football fields of topsoil per minute).

POLLUTION & EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS

The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has skyrocketed to 400ppm (the highest in over 800,000 years), and the emissions from today will stay there for another century.

 Despite extensive lobbying, it is now known that the biggest 15 ships produce as much pollution as all the cars in the world. They burn the dirtiest of all fuels, and have to pay surprisingly low taxes for it. But nothing that we do pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than air travel, yet new airports are build and existing ones extended, and the number of airplanes in the sky on any given day continues to rise.

The world’s hunger for oil and the companies’ increasing difficulty to meet the demands by conventional means have created over one trillion liters (!) of highly toxic sludge from tar sand processing in Canada. Those ponds cover an area of over 220 km2 — as big as 73 Central Park’s.
 But those are not the only extremely hazardous black lakes there are — a giant lake filled with thick, black sludge in China was recently dubbed “the worst place in the world”. It is a result of our worrying dependency on smartphones: in inner Mongolia, the ‘rare earth’ minerals needed to build them are processed, and the vast amounts of biohazardous and radioactive waste is discharged arbitrarily into the landscape right next to the factories.

 Even if the industry would disappear tomorrow, their carcinogenic waste would stay with us for centuries, polluting skies, rivers and soil.

Microplastics are found not only in the oceans, but in alarming quantities in most tap water all around the world. They even made it into the atmosphere, making it literally impossible to escape the plastic particles small enough to enter the cells of your body, where their toxicity increases the chance of cancer and other diseases.

All those problems will, due to climate breakdown, only get worse in the future (Lynas, 2009). Positive feedback systems now lead to unstoppable changes on the surface of the planet. Rapidly melting ice caps mixed with increased air pollution leaves a dark layer of dirt on the surface, enhancing further warming and melting of the ice. Forest fires all around the world contribute to an ever-hotter climate, which in turn leads to even bigger, more devastating forest fires.

Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, said: “The past three years have all been in the top three years in terms of temperature records. This is part of a long term warming trend. We have witnessed extraordinary weather, including temperatures topping 50C in Asia, record-breaking hurricanes in rapid succession in the Caribbean and Atlantic reaching as far as Ireland, devastating monsoon flooding affecting many millions of people and a relentless drought in East Africa.”

Sea levels have already risen considerably, and even the most pessimistic forecasts have proven to be true. In his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claimed that sea level rise will flood the 911 memorial — at that time ridiculed — which actually happened during hurricane Sandy.
Hurricanes increase in intensity every year, leaving behind post-apocalyptic landscapes like seen in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria.

RESOURCES

Resources such as oil, phosphorus, antimony, indium, silver, copper, sand, and others long have peaked, hence officials do what they can to ensure the public that everything is alright and no problems are ahead — it would cost them their jobs and render their occupations superfluous if they said the truth.

The only “official” numbers on how much oil remains are presented annually by — you guessed it — BP. Not very convincing. Those numbers are presented in confusing fashion, since BP’s calculations are based on “current consumption levels”. But guess what, consumption is increasing, and despite so-called renewable energies having a small share of the overall energy created, our world still relies heavily on fossil fuels. This is not going to change anytime soon. 

If you do the same calculation with the average growth rate in oil consumption, you’ll end up at a date somewhat 15 years earlier (2052). And remember: this is only if all discovered oil fields can successfully be exploited, whether they are under the Arctic ice shield or in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Furthermore, this is supposed to be the day where we arrive at zero barrels of crude oil, so scarcity will start much sooner.

For years they have been pushing back the date of when exactly the world will run out of oil, because they constantly seem to find new reserves. Even if that might be the case, it is worth noting that those newly discovered oil fields are in the most inaccessible places, since all the fields that are easily exploited are already empty. Those new oil reserves require increasingly dangerous, expensive and destructive technology: offshore drilling, fracking, and the extraction of oil from tar sands.

While the question of how much oil there is really left leaves room for speculation, I recommend looking at the graphs yourself.

War over resources are supposed to increase, and it is even the most basic resources that inspire conflict. With the Tibetan glaciers melting, China, India, and all countries around the Mekong River can expect serious water shortages in a few years. In China alone, over 28.000 rivers have dried up already, according to the Ministry of Water Resources. 

All in all, an estimated 2 billion (!) people are in danger.

“Many experts say that wars were fought over land before, but nowadays, wars are fought over energy and soon there will be wars fought over water,” said Lobsang Sangay, the head of the Tibetan Administration in Exile.

FAMINE

At a time where even pro-business and pro-development Forbes Magazine writes that “Capitalism Will Starve Humanity Until 2050” (unless it “changes” — whatever that means — but this big change is yet to come), it should be clear that we’re very close to the total collapse of global food supply. In the article, the only problem addressed is overfishing of the oceans (not even the ongoing acidification or pollution is included).

A sophisticated simulation called ‘Food Chain Reaction’ was built by experts of the State Department, the World Bank, and multinational agrobusiness giant Cargill, along with other independent researchers and specialists. It involved the participation of 65 officials from countries all over the world, as well as key multilateral and intergovernmental institutions.

“By 2024, the scenario saw global food prices spike by as much as 395 percent due to prolonged crop failures in key food basket regions, driven largely by climate change, oil price spikes, and confused responses from the international community.”

The importance of this simulation lays in the fact that it was created partly by powerful organizations, who would lie to the public but not to themselves — as it was the case with Big Oil publicly denying climate breakdown, but internally preparing for its effects. They might tell the public that we have another 40 years or so worth of oil in the ground, but they themselves know that 2024 would be a much closer call for either scenario.

Now, remember, all those factors examined here are interrelated. No oil means consequently no food in the supermarkets. You can imagine what would happen.

According to reports by a government contractor, “the US national security industry already plans for the impact of an unprecedented global food crisis lasting as long as a decade.”

OVERPOPULATION

The world is, in contrast what humanists and futurists might say, vastly overpopulated (Their error is to think the planet is empty and just waiting to be filled up with humans). That means we have exceeded the carrying capacity of this planet by several billion people. There is no way that such number of people could ever live in a sustainable relationship with their environment.

More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, in some cases in apartments so small that they are called ‘coffin homes’.

The numbers are staggering: “The built world that sustains us is so vast that, for every pound of an average person’s body, there are 30 tons of infrastructure: roads, houses, sidewalks, utility grids, intensively farmed soil, and so forth”, says Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Without this enormous construct to sustain our current population levels, we would fall back somewhere between ten and two hundred million. If anything would happen to any part of the infrastructure listed above, the consequences would be severe.

When we talk about overpopulation, we also have to include the fact that domestic animals for human use outweigh wild terrestrial mammals by a factor of 25 to one. Civilized humans come with a lot of luggage.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UNREST

Saying that society falls apart is no longer an exaggeration. Every day there are huge protests and clashes with the police all around the world. The public is divided into ever more fractions that are unable to come to any compromise. Whether left or right, conservative or liberal, pro- or anti gun, refugee, abortion, vaccines, or climate change, the two opposing fractions are doing nothing but hardening their own hearts against the other side. They are trapped in echo chambers on social media that only confirm what they already believe to know, and therefore intensifies their conviction of their own righteousness.

This year alone, there were over 50,000 (!) recorded incidents of gun violence in the United States — 307 of which were mass shootings.

Radical groups, sometimes militarized, are on the rise all over the planet. Whether patriot groups in the US, FARC in Colombia, pirates at the coast of Somalia, ISIS in the Philippines, Boko Haram in Nigeria, or underground right-wing terror cells in Europe, everyone seems to prepare for some final war.

Technology, once viewed almost exclusively in positive terms, encounters more and more skepticism as Big Tech tightens its grip around our personal lives. A large number of people in the developed world is seriously addicted to smartphones — no wonder, since they are in turn specifically designed to make us addicted. More studies emerge every week showing the huge downside of advanced technology, that most of us so far have simply overlooked. The effects of our highly technologized society on our children are spine-chilling — and its consequences even more.

Managers, CEOs, bankers, politicians and other members of the upper class systematically avoid paying taxes, therefore robbing the public of money that is desperately needed in the communities. The leak of millions of documents, called the Panama- and Paradise Papers shows the sheer scale of this peerless fraud. A global plutocracy has reached unimaginable power. Oligopolies control the economy, politics and society. Dystopia is here.

On an international level, democracy doesn’t seem to work anymore. With the emergence of more and more authoritarian leaders such as Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Chan-Ocha, Duterte, and Órban, the world slowly starts shifting towards an uncertain future.

Politics has always been a dirty business. But in the digital age it gets increasingly hard for politicians to hide their wrongdoings and corruption. Without portable cameras in everyone’s pocket and all information being stored online it is impossible to hide things as long as governments used to do back in the days — until everyone involved was beyond the reach of persecution: retired or dead.

How many times have we witnessed governments change from liberal, to conservative, and to liberal again, all ruled for by people who really believed that this election will finally set things straight. It is unbelievable to me that people still fall for this.

Economic collapse is imminent, not only because of all the bubbles yet to burst (like the debt bubble, the student-loan bubble, the tech bubble, or the giant real estate bubble that caused China’s double-digit growth and led to vast half-finished ghost towns for millions of inhabitants — China used more cement in three years than the US in the entire 20th century for those projects, which in turn is one of the reason the world is running out of sand), but simply because economic growth is reaching its absolute limit.

We are trapped in a dilemma: we collectively decided that we “need” economic growth, yet economic growth destroys the planet and continues to deprive us of the last freedoms and resources. There is no logical approach to solving this fundamental crisis that undermines even the most basic assumptions about ourselves and our place in this world. If our economy is not growing anymore, what else is there to do? If, after all the cumulative effort, the contraption we’ve built will collapse in on itself anyway, where’s the point? Good question.

INEQUALITY

Global inequality is worse than ever — and probably even worse than that. Poverty is a trap, and being rich literally pays off. Banks take money from those in debt (the poorer you are the more you have to pay), and pay money to bigwigs, who receive more money the richer they are.

The many other gaps between men and women, black and white, East and West, developed and developing are nowhere near closed as well.

WARFARE

With the erratic Donald Trump as president of the United States, and Putin, who wants to keep up with the United States renewal of their nuclear arsenal, a nuclear arms race has once again started that was already called a Cold War 2.0. 

With North Korea shooting missile after missile in Japan’s direction and sending threat after threat over the pacific for fear of their own nation’s continued existence, nuclear war has become a real possibility. 

The climate between Pakistan and India (both nuclear powers) is as tense as ever, with India showing increasing concern about possible conflict with China in the future, too. China is involved in an ongoing genocide in Myanmar, for the sake of building a pipeline through the country to supply China with oil. 

Israel still doesn’t let anyone inspect their nuclear weapons arsenal and their increasingly fascist government is a ticking timebomb in the Middle East.

The infamous ‘Doomsday Clock’ is again at two and a half minutes to midnight — the closest since 1953.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria might have been defeated on the ground, but the ideas and the hate will sure stay, inspiring new jihadi movements to sprout up. In a vicious cycle of violence, terrorist attacks in the West are answered with bombing campaigns, which in turn fuel the propaganda of radical Islam.

Warfare itself changes, too. There is a tendency towards automation, and digital warfare is an increasingly real threat.

Drones are used on a regular basis against weaker countries, even though they cause more civilian deaths than regular battles. It is just very convenient to randomly fire missiles into crowds of alleged terrorists from eight kilometers above. 

Combat robots are developed and tested by armies all around the world.

Ever more powerful weapon technologies are being built despite international agreements on their ban — and used, as seen with the sarin gas attack in Syria and the ‘Mother of all Bombs’ dropped on a mountainside in Afghanistan by the Trump administration.

DISEASE

Public health isn’t increasing either, and pollution might be the number one reason — pollution now kills more people than smoking, hunger, natural disasters, war, murder, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria together. While we continue to destroy Nature, this very act unleashes more diseases.
With the advancement of globalization, and despite popular opinion, global health continues to decline.

The nutritional value of our food is at a historic low, vital phytonutrients have virtually disappeared from our daily meals, industrial sugar in almost every processed food poisons generations, and biodiversity declines as a direct result of conventional agriculture. We, as a society, are “overfed but undernourished” — for the first time in human history there are now more over- than underweight people in the world.

The air in New Delhi, a city with a population of 26 million people, has reach a toxicity equal to smoking 50 cigarettes per day. The most polluted cities on earth are almost exclusively located in India, China and Saudi Arabia. 

This is not because Western countries are cleaner, it is because they simple export their own pollution.

There seems no way out of the opioid crisis in the US — Big Pharma lobbied doctors and lawmakers into easily prescribing them, getting millions of people addicted, and now, as the Trump administration cracks down on painkillers, those people are forced into use of heroin and fentanyl.

The World Health Organization and numerous other experts have continuously warned of the disastrous consequences of a post-antibiotic world, where even the smallest infection might end deadly and surgery is not an option anymore. Yet no one can think of a way to reduce antibiotic prescriptions by doctors or the use of antibiotics in factory farming. Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”, who will most likely kill millions in the next decades, emerge on a worrying scale in China, India, and even in the Western world.

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Everyone, this is how collapse looks like. It may take years or even decades, but we have already set it in motion. We are at the beginning of a gradual downwards spiral, that accelerates as it spins on into the abyss. Watch it slowly unfold over the next few years, and better make plans for what you will do — because many members of the upper-class elites who know and understand the world on a global level are already making emergency plans for the coming cataclysm. 

You see, I am by far not the only one who thinks like this (there are Theodore Kaczynski, Paul Kingsnorth, Derrick Jensen, Edward Abbey, and John Zerzan, just to name a few more popular advocates), nor the first one to point this out (just think about Thomas Malthus, who warned of collapse in 1826). 

A NASA-funded study focusing on only two issues concluded that “Two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed. […] The stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity and the economic stratification of society into Elites and Masses.” According to the researchers, “collapse is difficult to avoid. […] Elites grow and consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society.”

From collapses of past societies we now know that in most cases, there is not one single factor that we can attribute this collapse to, but rather a series of interrelated events (Scott, 2017). 

Our globalized society shows not only some, but all of the factors that led to collapse of past civilizations, and through the use of advanced technology we have been able to create conditions worse than any other civilization ever had to endure. Some might think, “Well, if technology has brought us so far, it will sure bring us further”, and they might even be right — but only for the next few years. It is obvious that the techno-industrial system can’t continue to try to fix occurring issues forever. There are simply not enough resources left. Like the Roman Empire when it began to decline, we’re in a period of overshoot, that will inevitably be followed by collapse (Tainter, 1988).
Time is running out.

In the past, when a civilization was in the process of collapsing, other surrounding societies could take advantage of their vulnerability, and sometimes merge the remains with their own empire. This is not an option anymore in times of global interdependency on international trade and transportation. If one goes down, the others follow. The Domino Theory of collapse.

It is also impossible to recreate our civilization, since we already burned all the fossil fuels needed for the technological advancements that allow a global civilization to temporary sustain itself.

Fantasies of “colonizing the universe” are not helping us either — we humans evolved over millions of years to fit exactly into the conditions found here on Earth — this atmosphere, this temperature, this chemical composition of solids, liquids and gasses, this gravity, this UV intensity — and it is absurd to think that we could create a functioning ecosystem on an entirely different planet all by ourselves in a matter of decades. Even the most ambitious plans for colonizing Mars will fail because of resource depletion and any given combination of all factors leading to collapse listed above. If, against all odds, anyone gets to “escape” Earth, it will not be you, anyway — it will be the one that pays the most.

Free energy is nowhere around the corner, neither is truly sustainable energy. 

Solar panels are made from sand, which is running out. The production of photovoltaic plates for solar panels requires tremendous amounts of energy, involves the excessive use of highly toxic chemicals and creates vast amounts of waste products such as silicon tetrachloride (three to four tons of which are produced for every ton of the desired polysilicon), which forms hydrochloric acid upon contact with water, is often casually dumped somewhere and already devastated landscapes in China.
Constructing dams kills river ecosystems and creates one billion (!) tons of greenhouse gasses a year. Wind turbines are producing millions of tons of trash and kill birds, bats and insects.
Furthermore, all of the above technologies depend on the same old, dirty system of mining, transporting, smelting, refining, shipping, assembling, manufacturing, distributing and constructing.
The only sustainable form of energy on this planet comes in form of calories.

You might call me a pessimist now, but I don’t think you would find enough positive news to outweigh the above. This is not pessimism, this is what actually happens.

Neither is this alarmism. The only alarming thing is that there are people blind enough to think that everything will work out just fine, as long as we just recycle, invest more money in solar companies, drink fair-trade coffee, buy a brand-new Tesla, or drive a bicycle to work.

Politicians continue to ensure us that “the best days are yet to come”, yet most of us feel the opposite — it is the worst days that are yet to come. And worse those days will be. As with earlier collapses, the aftermath must be horrifying. But would it be really that bad?

I’ve heard people calling the announcement of collapse ‘elitist’, since, according to the logic they apply, you automatically approve of millions — if not billions — of people dying. They hold the unquestioned assumption that it will be “the others” who will suffer the most, which is true — but only as long as civilization exists and continues to suppress and exploit them. Millions, maybe billions, will die anyway if this system continues to wreak havoc on this planet.

Actually, it will be the global elite which will be hit the worst: the urban populations of the Western world with no knowledge of basic survival or the ecosystem around their cities. 

The global rural poor might actually be better off without the capitalist system stealing their land or exploiting and enslaving them. Consider the words of Anuradha Mittal, former co-director of Food First, who said that former granaries of India now export dog food and tulips to Europe. Same goes for many of the urban poor, who live in slums not by choice but because they were forced to relocate, thanks to the actions of multinational corporations and banks — they still have the knowledge of how to live a life as subsistence farmer.

The ones hit hardest by global collapse will be those in the highest ranks of our civilizations’ hierarchy.

Feeling hopeless yet? Despite the overwhelming horror all this might induce at first, there is no need for nihilism and despair.

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A New Hope

But not all is lost — as presented by James C. Scott and Joseph Tainter, the “Dark Ages” following previous collapses were often a time were personal freedom flourished, and repressive systems were replaced by community efforts to support each other.

Civilized culture might not have any plans for the event of collapse of infrastructure, trade, industry and medicinal and food supply. Most people imagine some kind of post-apocalyptic ‘Mad Max’ scenario where the ones with the most guns rule and a more primitive but still civilized lifestyle emerges that brings back the horrors of our own civilized past — famine, plague, slavery, and the “law of the strongest” (sometimes falsely called “the law of the jungle”). This nightmarish tale was the inspiration for a number of Hollywood movies that further put focus on the alleged inevitability of some chaotic, violent future for humanity (Think about “The Book of Eli”, “World War Z”, “12 Monkeys”, “I Am Legend”, “The Day After Tomorrow”, “The Matrix”, “Oblivion”, “28 Days Later” and even kids’ movies like “WALL-E”). As a response to those nightmarish scenarios, some buy ammunition and canned food in anticipation of the cataclysm — but when the last bullet is fired and the last can of beans emptied, they are back at exactly the point where they started.

This vision of the future is indeed terrifying, since after all it is a very likely scenario — even though most people would prefer to have some alternative.

What we lack is an idea of what to do, a short- and long-term plan for when things go south. We seem to have all the knowledge in the world, but yet we lack the simple knowledge of how to live.

But you can call of the search and cancel the think tank meetings: There already is a truly sustainable lifestyle, proven successful for three million years and counting and custom-tailored for us humans by the indisputable power of evolution: tribalism.

Evolution came up with a social organization for every animal, carefully selected through trial and error until reaching the optimum. It organized whales in pods, baboons in troops, wolves in packs, buffalo in herds, birds in flocks, ants in colonies, bees in hives, school in fish — and humans in tribes. There is a way for every single animal that works for this animal within the limits of its ecological niche (and therefore for all the other animals inhabiting this niche, too).

Who are we to think that after only a few thousand years we came up with something better, more successful?! There was no rational impulse to carefully construct something considering any possible limits and boundaries, people just started building like fury! The one big long-term study on whether civilizations are sustainable enough to successfully replace tribalism will soon come to a final conclusion: No.

We have to get off our high horse and come in contact with the Earth once again. We have to realize the huge mistake we made, the “worst mistake in the history of the human race”, as anthropologist and best-selling author Jared Diamond called it. We have to remember the “original affluent society”, as another anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, famously wrote.

Most modern-day anthropologists are already united in the ability to see through the racial bias of earlier times, and come to surprisingly positive conclusions about the exact same people that were considered “savages” whose lives were “nasty, brutish and short” in times of colonialization. They see people who are peaceful, content, and happy, who carefully consider their actions, avoid confrontation, and have no significant impact on their environment. If you think I am perpetuating the “Noble Savage Myth”, just watch a documentary about any primitive tribe, or read a book by someone who experienced their life first hand.

Without even one exception, all of the problems listed in the first part of this essay are directly motivated by and justified with the unquestioned assumption that we humans can do with this world as we please — we can destroy, improve, relocate, build, dam up, extract, cut down, construct, dig out, burn, and dump as much as we want, like gods, shaping the world to fit our desires. This misbelief, called anthropocentrism, is what caused all those terrible things in the first place. 

The underlying theme of our own culture’s mythology was formulated by Daniel Quinn as follows: “The world was made for man, and man was made to conquer and rule it.” We have lived by those words until now, and it almost killed us. It has shattered this once beautiful and thriving planet into pieces, dust and trash.

But this is no inherently human belief. It is the belief of only one single culture. A culture that rose from the first agrarian settlements to a globalized techno-industrial civilization.

As you may have noticed, I purposely avoided to make general claims about humanity, and therefore used terms like “civilized humans” in my argumentation. I did this to stress the fact that ‘we’ do not represent humanity (Quinn, 1996). There is nothing wrong with humans as a species. For 99% or our species’ time on this planet, we have been nomadic hunter-gatherers, and this most successful of all lifestyles continues to this day, where dozens of uncontacted tribes make it clear that they are not interested in the development our civilization has to offer in exchange for their home, the forest.

Those primitive people, as long as they are left alone by the people of our culture and live in “voluntary isolation”, are living proof that the lifestyle does still work — so good in fact that it is worth defending with their very lives. And there is more: primitive life doesn’t only work for humans (who enjoy a varied organic diet and therefore superior health, ample leisure time and low levels of stress because of a lifestyle characterized by play), it works for other animals, as well as plants, rivers, and mountains.

 Some may now claim that I “romanticize the past”, but this accusation is usually made by people who think it is more ‘grown up’ to romanticize the future.

Don’t get me wrong! I am not proposing to “go back to the Stone Age” (which of course is physically impossible), nor do I want everyone to become a hunter-gatherer. But there is a lot we can learn from those (ab)original people, because they have the most important knowledge of all, the knowledge that we lack: they know how to live, without devastating their environment on which we depend for our very survival.

I do advocate self-sufficiency, autonomy, independence, simplification, localization and rewilding. Knowing the plants around you, the movement of the mammals and the language of birds. Reading Nature’s signs, predicting the weather and listening to the wind in the leaves. Doing things yourself and not relying on people you don’t know. Feeding yourself, planting trees, building your own house, creating and nurturing a community and caring about the people you love. Carving a flute and mastering it. Reading and educating yourself and others. Playing games and laughing. Drinking tea when it’s cold and taking a bath when it’s hot.

I advocate trying to do everything yourself, from materials that you yourself collected and processed. I advocate quitting your job, going back to the countryside, breathing the fresh air, feeling the sun on your skin, and letting go. Breaking out of the cage. Being as free as you can.

I cannot provide you with a final solution to all of our problems, but I can tell you were to look for answers to those problems. I say we make the best of our situation, we embrace collapse, and use the opportunity to create something better — something that works. The possibilities are endless.

I have looked for answers, and I found many of them answered by simplifying every possible aspect of my life, spending plenty of time in the garden inspecting and observing plants and animals, and looking to the indigenous people in whose area I now live if I have any further questions. Not to imitate them, but to understand them and learn from them. 

And it works! Since I quit my civilized life four years ago, I became stronger and healthier than ever before, have more freedom and free time, eat better, use much less money, worry less, and am generally more happy and content.

Sometimes you have to take a step back to move forward.

Works cited:

Daniel Quinn: The Story of B (Bantam, 1996)

Derrick Jensen: Endgame, Vol. 1 (Seven Stories Press, 2006)

James C. Scott: Against the Grain — A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017)

Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Mark Lynas: Six Degrees — Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Fourth Estate, 2009)

Michael Williams: Deforesting the Earth — From Prehistory to Global Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Ronald Wright: A Short History of Progress (House of Anansi Press, 2004)

Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking

By Veronique Greenwood

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.

From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he’d wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when it finally came out in 1976, did not look like a best-seller. But sell it did. It was reviewed in science magazines and psychology journals, Time, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978. New editions continued to come out, as Jaynes went on the lecture circuit. Jaynes died of a stroke in 1997; his book lived on. In 2000, another new edition hit the shelves. It continues to sell today.

In the beginning of the book, Jaynes asks, “This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it? And where did it come from? And why?” Jaynes answers by unfurling a version of history in which humans were not fully conscious until about 3,000 years ago, instead relying on a two-part, or bicameral, mind, with one half speaking to the other in the voice of the gods with guidance whenever a difficult situation presented itself. The bicameral mind eventually collapsed as human societies became more complex, and our forebears awoke with modern self-awareness, complete with an internal narrative, which Jaynes believes has its roots in language.

It’s a remarkable thesis that doesn’t fit well with contemporary thought about how consciousness works. The idea that the ancient Greeks were not self-aware raises quite a few eyebrows. By giving consciousness a cultural origin, says Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, “Jaynes disavows consciousness as a biological phenomenon.”

But Koch and other neuroscientists and philosophers admit Jaynes’ wild book has a power all its own. “He was an old-fashioned amateur scholar of considerable depth and tremendous ambition, who followed where his curiosity led him,” says philosopher Daniel Dennett. The kind of search that Jaynes was on—a quest to describe and account for an inner voice, an inner world we seem to inhabit—continues to resonate. The study of consciousness is on the rise in neuroscience labs around the world, but the science isn’t yet close to capturing subjective experience. That’s something Jaynes did beautifully, opening a door on what it feels like to be alive, and be aware of it.

Jaynes was the son of a Unitarian minister in West Newton, Massachusetts. Though his father died when Jaynes was 2 years old, his voice lived on in 48 volumes of his sermons, which Jaynes seems to have spent a great deal of time with as he grew up. In college, he experimented with philosophy and literature but decided that psychology, with its pursuit of real data about the physical world, was where he should seek answers to his questions. He headed to graduate school in 1941, but shortly thereafter, the United States joined World War II. Jaynes, a conscientious objector, was assigned to a civilian war effort camp. He soon wrote a letter to the U.S. Attorney General announcing that he was leaving, finding the camp’s goal incompatible with his principles: “Can we work within the logic of an evil system for its destruction? Jesus did not think so ... Nor do I.” He was sent to prison, where he had plenty of time to reflect on the problem of consciousness. “Jaynes was a man of principle, some might say impulsively or recklessly so,” a former student and a neighbor recalled. “He seemed to draw energy from jousting windmills.”

Jaynes emerged after three years, convinced that animal experiments could help him understand how consciousness first evolved, and spent the next three years in graduate school at Yale University. For a while, he believed that if a creature could learn from experience, it was having an experience, implying consciousness. He herded single paramecia through a maze carved in wax on Bakelite, shocking them if they turned the wrong way. “I moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earthworms, fish, and reptiles, which could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution of consciousness,” he recounts in his book. “Ridiculous! It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all.” Many creatures could be trained, but what they did was not introspection. And that was what tormented Jaynes.

Meanwhile, he performed more traditional research on the maternal behavior of animals under his advisor, Frank Beach. It was a difficult time to be interested in consciousness. One of the dominant psychological theories was behaviorism, which explored the external responses of humans and animals to stimuli. Conditioning with electric shocks was in, pondering the intangible world of thoughts was out, and for understandable reasons—behaviorism was a reaction to earlier, less rigorous trends in psychology. But for much of Jaynes’ career, inner experience was beyond the pale. In some parts of this community to say you studied consciousness was to confess an interest in the occult.

In 1949, Jaynes left without receiving his Ph.D., apparently having refused to submit his dissertation. It’s not clear exactly why—some suggest his committee wanted revisions he would not make, some that he was irked by the hierarchical structure of academia, some that he simply was fed up enough to walk. One story he told was that he didn’t want to pay the $25 submission fee. (In 1977, as his book was selling, Jaynes completed his Ph.D. at Yale.) But it does seem clear that he was frustrated by his lack of progress. He later wrote that a psychology based on rats in mazes rather than the human mind was “bad poetry disguised as science.”

It was the beginning of an odd peregrination. In the fall of 1949, he moved to England and became a playwright and actor, and for the next 15 years, he ricocheted back and forth across the ocean, alternating between plays and adjunct teaching, eventually landing at Princeton University in 1964. All the while, he had been reading widely and pondering the question of what consciousness was and how it could have arisen. By 1969, he was thinking about a work that would describe the origin of consciousness as a fundamentally cultural change, rather than the evolved one he had searched for. It was to be a grand synthesis of science, archaeology, anthropology, and literature, drawing on material gathered during the past couple decades of his life. He believed he’d finally heard something snap into place.

The book sets its sights high from the very first words.  “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!” Jaynes begins. “A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.”

To explore the origins of this inner country, Jaynes first presents a masterful precis of what consciousness is not. It is not an innate property of matter. It is not merely the process of learning. It is not, strangely enough, required for a number of rather complex processes. Conscious focus is required to learn to put together puzzles or execute a tennis serve or even play the piano. But after a skill is mastered, it recedes below the horizon into the fuzzy world of the unconscious. Thinking about it makes it harder to do. As Jaynes saw it, a great deal of what is happening to you right now does not seem to be part of your consciousness until your attention is drawn to it. Could you feel the chair pressing against your back a moment ago? Or do you only feel it now, now that you have asked yourself that question?

Consciousness, Jaynes tells readers, in a passage that can be seen as a challenge to future students of philosophy and cognitive science, “is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.” His illustration of his point is quite wonderful. “It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”

Perhaps most striking to Jaynes, though, is that knowledge and even creative epiphanies appear to us without our control. You can tell which water glass is the heavier of a pair without any conscious thought—you just know, once you pick them up. And in the case of problem-solving, creative or otherwise, we give our minds the information we need to work through, but we are helpless to force an answer. Instead it comes to us later, in the shower or on a walk. Jaynes told a neighbor that his theory finally gelled while he was watching ice moving on the St. John River. Something that we are not aware of does the work.

The picture Jaynes paints is that consciousness is only a very thin rime of ice atop a sea of habit, instinct, or some other process that is capable of taking care of much more than we tend to give it credit for. “If our reasonings have been correct,” he writes, “it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but were not conscious at all.”

Jaynes believes that language needed to exist before what he has defined as consciousness was possible. So he decides to read early texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees that in The Iliad. He writes that the characters in The Iliad do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative. They only do what is suggested by the gods. When something needs to happen, a god appears and speaks. Without these voices, the heroes would stand frozen on the beaches of Troy, like puppets.

Speech was already known to be localized in the left hemisphere, instead of spread out over both hemispheres. Jaynes suggests that the right hemisphere’s lack of language capacity is because it used to be used for something else—specifically, it was the source of admonitory messages funneled to the speech centers on the left side of the brain. These manifested themselves as hallucinations that helped guide humans through situations that required complex responses—decisions of statecraft, for instance, or whether to go on a risky journey.

The combination of instinct and voices—that is, the bicameral mind—would have allowed humans to manage for quite some time, as long as their societies were rigidly hierarchical, Jaynes writes. But about 3,000 years ago, stress from overpopulation, natural disasters, and wars overwhelmed the voices’ rather limited capabilities. At that point, in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, bits and pieces of the conscious mind would have come to awareness, as the voices mostly died away. That led to a more flexible, though more existentially daunting, way of coping with the decisions of everyday life—one better suited to the chaos that ensued when the gods went silent. By The Odyssey, the characters are capable of something like interior thought, he says. The modern mind, with its internal narrative and longing for direction from a higher power, appear.

The rest of the book—400 pages—provides what Jaynes sees as evidence of this bicamerality and its breakdown around the world, in the Old Testament, Maya stone carvings, Sumerian writings. He cites a carving of an Assyrian king kneeling before a god’s empty throne, circa 1230 B.C. Frequent, successive migrations around the same time in what is now Greece, he takes to be a tumult caused by the breakdown. And Jaynes reflects on how this transition might be reverberating today. “We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past,” he writes, in awe of the reach of this idea, and seized with the pathos of the situation. “Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now-silent deities, taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.”

It’s a sweeping and profoundly odd book. But The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was enormously appealing. Part of it might have been that many readers had never thought about just what consciousness was before. Perhaps this was the first time many people reached out, touched their certainty of self, and found it was not what they expected. Jaynes’ book did strike in a particular era when such jolts were perhaps uniquely potent. In the 1970s, many people were growing interested in questions of consciousness. Baumeister, who admires Jaynes, and read the book in galley form before it was published, says Jaynes tapped into the “spiritual stage” of the ascendant New Age movement.

And the language—what language! It has a Nabokovian richness. There is an elegance, power, and believability to his prose. It sounds prophetic. It feels true. And that has incredible weight. Truth and beauty intertwine in ways humans have trouble picking apart. Physicist Ben Lillie, who runs the Storycollider storytelling series, remembers when he discovered Jaynes’ book. “I was part of this group that hung out in the newspaper and yearbook offices and talked about intellectual stuff and wore a lot of black,” Lillie says. “Somebody read it. I don’t remember who was first, it wasn’t me. All of a sudden we thought, that sounds great, and we were all reading it. You got to feel like a rebel because it was going against common wisdom.”

It’s easy to find cracks in the logic: Just for starters, there are moments in The Iliad when the characters introspect, though Jaynes decides they are later additions or mistranslations. But those cracks don’t necessarily diminish the book’s power. To readers like Paul Hains, the co-founder of Aeon, an online science and philosophy magazine, Jaynes’ central thesis is of secondary importance to the book’s appeal. “What captured me was his approach and style and the inspired and nostalgic mood of the text; not so much the specifics of his argument, intriguing though they were,” Hains writes. “Jaynes was prepared to explore the frontier of consciousness on its own terms, without explaining away its mysterious qualities.”

Meanwhile, over the last four decades, the winds have shifted, as often happens in science as researchers pursue the best questions to ask. Enormous projects, like those of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Brain-Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, seek to understand the structure and function of the brain in order to answer many questions, including what consciousness is in the brain and how it is generated, right down to the neurons. A whole field, behavioral economics, has sprung up to describe and use the ways in which we are unconscious of what we do—a major theme in Jaynes’ writing—and the insights netted its founders, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith, the Nobel Prize.

Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, has conducted experiments to investigate how aware we are of things we are not focused on, which echo Jaynes’ view that consciousness is essentially awareness. “It’s not unreasonable to have a view that the only things you’re conscious of are things you are attending to right now,” Schwitzgebel says. “But it’s also reasonable to say that there’s a lot going on in the background and periphery. Behind the focus, you’re having all this experience.” Schwitzgebel says the questions that drove Jaynes are indeed hot topics in psychology and neuroscience. But at the same time, Jaynes’ book remains on the scientific fringe. “It would still be pretty far outside of the mainstream to say that ancient Greeks didn’t have consciousness,” he says.

Dennett, who has called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind a “marvelous, wacky book,” likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt. “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk,” he says. Particularly, he thinks Jaynes’ insistence on a difference between what goes on in the minds of animals and the minds of humans, and the idea that the difference has its origins in language, is deeply compelling.

“[This] is a view I was on the edge of myself, and Julian kind of pushed me over the top,” Dennett says. “There is such a difference between the consciousness of a chimpanzee and human consciousness that it requires a special explanation, an explanation that heavily invokes the human distinction of natural language,” though that’s far from all of it, he notes. “It’s an eccentric position,” he admits wryly. “I have not managed to sway the mainstream over to this.”

It’s a credit to Jaynes’ wild ideas that, every now and then, they are mentioned by neuroscientists who study consciousness. In his 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, sympathizes with Jaynes’ idea that something happened in the human mind in the relatively recent past. “As knowledge accumulated about humans and about the universe, continued reflection could well have altered the structure of the autobiographical self and led to a closer stitching together of relatively disparate aspects of mind processing; coordination of brain activity, driven first by value and then by reason, was working to our advantage,” he writes. But that’s a relatively rare endorsement. A more common response is the one given by neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland, an emerita professor at the University of California, San Diego. “It is fanciful,” she says of Jaynes’ book. “I don’t think that it added anything of substance to our understanding of the nature of consciousness and how consciousness emerges from brain activity.”

Jaynes himself saw his theory as a scientific contribution, and was disappointed with the research community’s response. Although he enjoyed the public’s interest in his work, tilting at these particular windmills was frustrating even for an inveterate contrarian. Jaynes’ drinking grew heavier. A second book, which was to have taken the ideas further, was never completed.

And so, his legacy, odd as it is, lives on. Over the years, Dennett has sometimes mentioned in his talks that he thought Jaynes was on to something. Afterward—after the crowd had cleared out, after the public discussion was over—almost every time there would be someone hanging back. “I can come out of the closet now,” he or she would say. “I think Jaynes is wonderful too.”

Marcel Kuijsten is an IT professional who runs a group called the Julian Jaynes Society whose membership he estimates at about 500 or 600 enthusiasts from around the world. The group has an online members’ forum where they discuss Jaynes’ theory, and in 2013 for the first time they hosted a conference, meeting in West Virginia for two days of talks. “It was an incredible experience,” he says.

Kuijsten feels that many people who come down on Jaynes haven’t gone to the trouble to understand the argument, which he admits is hard to get one’s mind around. “They come into it with a really ingrained, pre-conceived notion of what consciousness means to them,” he says, “And maybe they just read the back of the book.” But he’s playing the long game. “I’m not here to change anybody’s mind. It’s a total waste of time. I want to provide the best quality information, and provide good resources for people who’ve read the book and want to have a discussion.”

To that end, Kuijsten and the Society have released books of Jaynes’ writings and of new essays about him and his work. Whenever discoveries that relate to the issues Jaynes raised are published, Kuijsten notes them on the site. In 2009 he highlighted brain-imaging studies suggesting that auditory hallucinations begin with activity in the right side of the brain, followed by activation on the left, which sounds similar to Jaynes’ mechanism for the bicameral mind. He hopes that as time goes on, people will revisit some of Jaynes’ ideas in light of new science.

Ultimately, the broader questions that Jaynes’ book raised are the same ones that continue to vex neuroscientists and lay people. When and why did we start having this internal narrative? How much of our day-to-day experience occurs unconsciously? What is the line between a conscious and unconscious process? These questions are still open. Perhaps Jaynes’ strange hypotheses will never play a role in answering them. But many people—readers, scientists, and philosophers alike—are grateful he tried.