Arthur Noll
People are interdependent, social beings. We do not, and cannot, live as the independent tiger, or orangutan, coming together only to mate briefly, all child care and education provided by the mother.
This has seemed obvious to me, and probably it is obvious to most, but it is such an important principle to base further observations on, and logically it is often ignored in the present scheme of things, so I think we should look at the reasons. Lets start with your naked body. Can you manage to clothe and feed and shelter this body, with no hands touching any article except your own hands? If you can make your own tools and live independently for just a few weeks or months, this is interesting, but of course real independence would be a lifetime of this, a reproducing lifetime, so it does fall considerably short of the mark. Additionally, it is an interesting thing that we are communicating, I have written and you are reading this paper. Independent organisms don’t behave like this, if you were independent, your only concern for me should be to tell me to get out of your way, or that you want to mate, and you need no language beyond what the tigers and orangutans use for this. I have heard people say, that they could live independently if they chose. To those few who feel that way, well, you haven’t chosen that path if you are reading this, so if you want to choose it now, then I think you ought to take off your society made things and go. We will send a biologist to study how you live – if you live.
Next question, is a male- female unit capable of independence? The answer is quite important to the issue of reproduction.
I have never heard of this being done, and I don’t believe it can be done. Working together, a man and woman with the proper education might make primitive tools and cover some basic needs, if resources are abundant. But wherever resources are abundant, you are going to find competition. Predators can be a serious problem with just primitive weapons, and just two people, one of which might be pregnant or holding an infant. It is true that most large predators are afraid of human beings at the present time, but animals of all kinds eventually test the limits. Domestic animals can be very sensitive about electric fences, for example. You can turn off the fence for weeks, after they learn about wires giving shocks. But they eventually test and learn, and are out. You would not likely find it workable to stay together all the time, either, and the one carrying the child would be alone and vulnerable. And of course, human predators working as a pack, a social group, certainly exist and are the most powerful threat of all. While fantasies are common about individuals and couples escaping social groups, the reality is different. Groups of people have made the rules for individuals for a long time.
It is interesting to note that walking on two legs has not been all that uncommon in the history of life, but I can think of no other species that has attempted pregnancy on two legs. Two legged creatures have always been egg layers, or marsupials, have never attempted the balancing act of a pregnancy on two legs. I think it is only possible within a social group.
Further problems are having very little backup for minor sprains or illness. Loneliness can be a big problem, even for couples, as most of us eventually crave other people in our lives.
The genetic and archaeological evidence indicates that we split off from chimpanzees, which are social creatures, and that we stayed social.
In spite of all this evidence of our interdependence, independence is a much-used word, and many do dream of having the power to defy groups, to live free. Why this reluctance to look at reality and accept it? I think it is possible that the dream of independence is partly composed of the real fear of having no value to the group, and being banished as a result, and death being a matter of time. To be out of work is to be out of society, to a large degree, in the present scheme of things. And then there is the prospect of not being able to fulfill the work you are given, that you are told to do things that might hurt or kill you, and that there is no choice, either do it or be cast out. This is also not a pleasant prospect, and people are attracted to dreams of escape. Just as significant, those who have far more than they need, and wish to keep it that way, are usually content to ignore the fact of the requirement of human teamwork to live. Which leads us to the question, how did things get to such a situation, that people fear the social structure that they need?
2. Structures of society
Instead of arguing the virtues of the systems that have been tried, lets try looking at relationships on a very basic level. To have a relationship at the most basic level, you have two people. Or even two organisms, the principles here will still apply. Now, if you have two people who have a relationship, either one person is going to tell the other what to do all of the time, a fixed hierarchy, or they are going to take turns telling each other what to do, lets call that partnership
Why should one person tell another what to do on any specific issue? It is a question of mastery, isn’t it? If one person can see better than the other, then in questions of sight, the one who sees better is logically master. Suppose you needed to follow a twisting trail through a swamp at night, would you put the person with the worst night vision in the lead? I think most groups would quickly figure that out. Of course, a problem arises in demonstrating mastery over some issues, and short term versus long-term thinking. But putting such questions aside for the moment, with a fixed hierarchy, you would seem to have one person who is master of all the matters that come up. Given the way talents are distributed among people, it is extremely rare that one person has mastery over everything, and should be in charge for every situation. If mastery is the criteria for decision making, then partnership, which is shifting mastery to various people in the group according to the situation, makes a lot more sense. Fewer mistakes and wasted energy will be had with such a system.
In the short term, fixed hierarchies can be kept in place with force, but compared to partnership, it is inherently inefficient. It always will cost a relationship more energy to force behavior, than if the behavior is voluntary. This is quite fundamental, so lets repeat it. It will always cost a relationship more energy to force behavior, than if the behavior is voluntary.
Obviously, to be efficient, partnership needs to be much more than simply taking turns at telling each other what to do. To be efficient, it should be predicated on shifting mastery. One person is master of this, the other person is master of that. Fair and honest competition tells who is master of what. If the competition isn’t honest, efficiency will suffer badly. The competition is going to cost some energy, but once things are settled, people can get into a routine that is very efficient. There are good lines of communication. The resentment of mastery overruled by force for the short term, often heedlessly causing pain, doesn’t have to be overcome. There is no fear of revolt, of strikes, there is no need of an armed force to either deal with these things or prevent them from forming. Partners quickly come to agreement on courses of action, act in unison, effectively deal with problems. The leaders of fixed hierarchies are always watching their backs to make sure someone doesn’t try to replace them.
It is probably fair to say that most of the existing societies of the world are actually combinations of these two patterns, of fixed hierarchy and partnership, but fixed hierarchy is usually the dominant pattern. A dictatorship is obviously a fixed hierarchy, but perhaps surprising, it is also found in the supposedly democratic capitalistic societies as well. With capitalism, for example, people with the most money are in charge, to a very large extent. Whether they have mastery of intellectual issues doesn’t matter. As long as they have the money, they are in charge. Sometimes the money is made by intellectual mastery, sometimes not. It may have been inherited, with nothing to indicate the fitness to have such power. If there is intellectual mastery it is often specialized, there is little coordination with other social players. Sometimes partnerships are formed, sometimes not. It is quite a mess, and often extremely wasteful. It has problems from other angles as well, we can look at that next.
To sum up, in a relationship, there are masters and servants. It can be fixed or it can shift back and forth. But if the master of any given situation abuses the power, asking too much or too little, the relationship is weakened. And yet we are interdependent, and need strong relationships, in order to deal effectively with problems.
3. Efficiency
Efficiency should be measured in terms of energy, not money.
This is a huge problem, simple at the core, yet resisted very strongly. We have this measure called money, and it is very common that people measure profit and loss in terms of money, and have an idea of how efficient they are with this. Unfortunately, when people use money, they are always mixing units of measure, often unknowing. There are always units of energy efficiency for the activities we engage in, and also there are measurements of the sustainability of the activity. Buying and selling are always about energy, there is nothing else in physical reality for it to be about. Buying food, fuel, shelter, clothes, tools, land, these are all about either getting energy directly or of controlling it’s flow. Energy measurements of our activities are complete by themselves, there is no need for more measurement of the activity, to say whether it is good or not, and good for the long term. But money is precisely such an additional measurement. It is very similar to mixing other units of measure, like feet and meters. The results are predictably bad for either situation.
With money, individuals act like independent agents. Every time a transaction is made with money, people add up the various measures of money and energy and sustainability in their heads, and make a decision of what is best for themselves. If they added the numbers on paper, the intellectual error of adding apples and oranges would be obvious, and it isn’t done. It is always added in the head. People don’t add up the numbers to get a number in their heads, they add the numbers up to a decision, they add them up to get a course of action. Often numbers of energy efficiency and sustainability are simply tossed away, or simply not considered. People have instinctive notions of energy efficiency, of how hard they are working for a given return, but to put a rigorous scientific understanding behind this is quite unusual. And concern for how hard other people are having to work is seldom considered if the myth of independence is taken as reality. Reality is there whether we are aware of it or not, however.
If we take a basic look at energy efficiency, we see that it actually defines life and death. Food is energy, if we spend more energy getting the food, than the food gives us energy to get the next meal, we can get in serious trouble. We keep reserves of fat, and store food, to prevent living hand to mouth on the issue, but if energy efficiency is lost for long enough, we starve to death. Clothes and shelter slow down energy loss from our bodies, and are very important to the total energy equation.
Summing up, with money, people act as independent agents, which they aren’t, and measure their actions with money, if they like the money numbers, they use them, if they like the energy numbers, they use that, perhaps they care about sustainability and perhaps they don’t. And if they are on the bottom of the fixed hierarchy, they might not have much choice in what they pick to buy.
Markets get into this action, setting prices, setting the hierarchy. The basic rule of the market is that abundant things are cheap, scarce things are expensive. This fits with energy measurement for only certain situations. If something is abundant, the energy required to get it will also be relatively low, it will be cheap to get in energy. But monetary cheap prices encourage use of a resource, and do not encourage conservation. Sustainability can easily be thrown out of the equation. If people are engaged in obtaining a “cheap” resource, in order to make enough to live on, they must bring in lots and lots of the resource to the market. This quite often makes them work much harder than they would like, and also makes them take resources faster than they renew, but the pain and danger are ignored. People with less common talents, who get paid more since they are scarcer, become addicted to the sense of having so much, and the market assigns them a value that can go very high. They become rich, become addicted to being rich, and control the whole system to a very large degree. As this destroys resources, prices may eventually rise to reflect the growing scarcity, but that only impels people to go out and hunt down the last of any given resource, it is worth doing so because the price is higher. If one wanted to design a tool to cause depletion, extinction, the market is that tool. Large bubbles of unsustainable population growth go along with the cheap prices at the beginning, giving the potential of disastrous die-off when limits are reached.
Ideas to fix the market include fixing prices to be higher, or lower, either by ignoring the market given prices and just setting them, or by raising taxes. Various Marxist and socialist societies have been tried doing this. This is at least making an attempt to solve problems, but it still ignores the reality that using money mixes units of measure, and the elastic nature of money. When taxes are raised on a fundamental commodity, for example, the increased price will slow down the use for a short period of time, but people eventually raise all the prices throughout the system and in the end, the percentage of the tax to the new prices is much smaller, and use of the commodity will pick up again. Setting prices at whims of what people want to be cheap is clearly a flawed idea, nature sets energy prices that cannot be ignored indefinitely.
While it is not a problem inherent to the use of money, charging interest is also a seriously flawed concept, as it means that the money supply constantly expands, because people pay back more than they borrowed. If all this money is going to be worth anything, then there must be resources to back it up, and that requires taking ever more from nature. But the earth is clearly a finite place, a sphere in space.
Energy flows. It flows from high temperature, to low temperature. It flows from high potential, to low potential. Money is a fixed unit, that doesn’t reflect the true flow of energy through the system. It accumulates, as people save it for lean times, they are attracted to it like the taste of fat. In order to finally reflect reality, inflation occurs, and conditions may grow like large bubbles that can collapse in very large amounts of inflation, basically signifying that resources have been destroyed to the point that there is no longer backing for the currency that has accumulated.
Ideas to make energy the standard for money have been proposed, but this problem is fundamental. You simply cannot “fix” energy like that. It flows. If one looks into the logistics of such a system, the complexity is very great. Take a simple example, the manufacture of a coat. There are energy costs to making the coat, you could figure these, and ask that the manufacturer get paid that much money representing that many calories. But if you are asking people to behave as independent agents, they also need a profit. The demand for coats is seasonal, and the manufacturer needs to live through times of no income. Perhaps some sort of disaster will occur to tools. So something should be put aside as insurance, as well as for down times. How much more money should they get? The people using the coats get an energy return from wearing them. How much? It depends on how cold it gets and how often the coats are worn. To really be fair, a royalty of energy should be paid to the manufacturer every time the coat is worn, reflecting how much energy it saved the wearer. But keeping track of all that gets very complex, when you start considering all the things people make and do. Keeping close track of all of them, printing up just enough money to match energy flows that vary, taking money out of circulation in a fair way to everyone, would be a very large job, it will be in itself a large energy cost of endless accounting. (Just as accounting in the present monetary system is already a very large energy drain). If one couldn’t find a better way, perhaps that would be what you would have to do, but I think better ways can be found. We will get to that in a moment.
With regard to how energy flows, much of the research being done in technology is ways to better store energy, make better batteries, and yet get at the energy easily. This is related to money, in that people are trying to store energy in money, and we need to understand about how energy flows. I think people have been spoiled by finding huge deposits of energy in fossil fuel. What is not generally being acknowledged about these things, is that nature “spent” huge amounts of energy to accumulate and store that energy. It accumulated as a very small part of the solar energy hitting the planet over millions of years, and was stored by being buried deeply, with tremendous geological movement, which is energy, away from the oxidizing effects of the atmosphere and weather. It took very large amounts of energy, far more than was stored, to form and store fossil energy. That is a general principle, it takes energy to store energy, and even the storage by nature is constantly being eroded, it often used to leak to the surface, where it oxidized, either fast or slow, or exposed deposits of fuel would catch fire, great amounts of it must have been burned from time to time by geological movements. Our efforts to put energy in a bottle need to reflect the energy cost of the bottle. Too often, people are fooled, the market says something is cheap, but if we are going to talk about energy efficiency, we cannot mix in monetary measure.
A simple example is a bicycle. Measurements of energy efficiency have been made on bicycles, and found that they were the most energy efficient way known on the planet to transport people. Something on the order of 800 miles to a gallon of gasoline, when the food energy used by the rider was compared to the energy in a gallon of gasoline. It was compared to other creatures and found to be way ahead of any way a creature had found to move. You might say “wow, that is great, we should all ride bicycles!” But the analysis did not include the cost of a hard flat road. It did not include the cost of making and forming the metals and rubber in the bicycle, and getting it from the centralized factories and into the hands of the rider. The sustainability of these things was not considered. These are not minor factors. The analysis took them for granted, or did not consider them at all. The market said that the metals and rubber and forming them were cheap, all done with momentarily abundant fossil fuel, and the same for the road. We should not be depending on this kind of analysis, it is seriously flawed. I would say here that this does not mean that bicycles are not energy efficient, they may still be energy efficient under some circumstances, I don’t know. What I do know is that the measurement as it has been done is badly flawed. And that this is certainly not an isolated case, it is very common.
People who have grown up using money can be mystified at how a society could possibly function without it. It confused me for years. But the answer is really simple. You figure the energy efficiency and sustainability of an activity, and people freely give and take within those limits. There is excellent precedent for an organization that works like this. Consider how your body works. It is a collection of specialized organs, rather like the way the different talents in a society can specialize. There are clear lines of communication, with no lying going on. If your nerves don’t work properly, you are considered sick, and in danger of dying. Food comes into your body, and it gets passed from one organ to another, each does some work on it and passes it on, no charge. All organs take freely just what they need from the bloodstream. Excess is stored for lean times, the whole body shares in it. For example, the stomach doesn’t demand payment for services rendered, and refuse to pass along what work it has done if it doesn’t feel satisfied with the price. You would collapse in a hurry if that sort of thing went on! In fact, if certain organs go “on strike”, we do collapse. We are sick.
The body also looks like a fixed hierarchy, with regard to brain and muscles. The difference is that the lines of communication are clear, just as in a partnership. Muscles make plain any pain immediately, and the brain pays attention. Muscles can be forced, but there is a price of pain to pay, and you can end up crippled for a very long time.
There are similar hierarchies in society. Look at the example of a construction project. There are a lot of workers, who likely have common simple talents, and a few engineers, who have uncommon mental talents. The engineers are like the brains of this “body”, while the workers are the hands and feet. The workers take risks that the engineers don’t, the engineers are protected, just as the brain of the body is protected by a skull, and a blood brain barrier. Yet with the body, while the brain is more protected, no part of the body is considered freely expendable. Just as there may be many common workers on a project, the body has lots of fingers and toes. You don’t give up fingers and toes easily. You really avoid that. If the engineers on the project were careless of life, the whole project could come to a halt, the workers would rebel. Your body will rebel if you push it too hard, are too careless with it. Is the value of the engineers any greater than the workers, if they cannot have the workers work safely and efficiently, and the result is rebellion? Any of the common workers might have got the same results. Those at the top of hierarchies, are still in partnership, if efficient results are going to be had. There is still give and take. The fixed hierarchy that doesn’t have free communications, is like if the skin got numb with cold, and the brain, instead of seeing this a sign to use caution, worked on anyway, unable to feel pain and perhaps really doing serious damage.
The workers can accept the value of the engineers if they do their jobs properly, accept the relationship, because ultimately, the engineers can do a better job of protecting them than they can themselves. The engineers can figure the strength of materials, figure out factors of safety, keep a lot of information in their heads, and make the project work with a high degree of safety and efficiency. In the final analysis, the workers are more expendable, they are more common and more easily replaced, but they must be treated as the engineers would treat their own bodies. Again, it is energy efficiency. How much energy does it take to replace a worker, how much to replace an engineer? Both have considerable costs, but the engineer costs more, they are scarcer, harder to find, and require more education.
In a healthy body, organs don’t take any more than they need. Even with the more fixed hierarchies of brain and muscle, the brain doesn’t take any more than it needs. But there is a common problem these days, of a brain disorder that involves taking too much. It is addiction. Instead of partnership with the body, the brain insists on having more of the chemicals that it usually produces for itself in small amounts. The body is forced repeatedly to help to get these chemicals, and it is not allowed enough rest, is not fed or cared for properly, the drugs the brain craves may poison other organs. In similar manner, relationships between workers and management, in which management has large attractions to more than it needs of money, or other resources, have very similar consequences. The workers are abused. Communications are ignored.
You cannot have efficiency if people, or organs, take more than they need. The addict is likely to complain at this point – why bother being efficient if there is plenty? Which leads us to the next serious question, sustainability.
4. Sustainability
Sustainability is a matter of not taking resources faster than they renew. You cannot cut trees faster than they grow, or net fish, or burn fossil fuels. You cannot pollute faster than pollution breaks down. There is a balance of resources, using too much energy to take resources tilts the balance away from sustainability.
Like the concept of interdependence, the energy efficiency of partnership, the idea of consistent measure, this seems so obvious that one almost wonders why it has to be said. One can wonder how an addict can avoid seeing easy logic as well. Ultimately, the argument comes down to the existence of magic, of infinite growth on a finite planet. The people who argue that resources are unlimited, that it is OK to not be efficient, because there is so much, are basically arguing that resources are infinite, and one can go on being wasteful and building up bubbles that will never burst. For their defense, they point at how limits have been reached in the past, but alternatives were found, and growth continued. They predict that this can always happen. Larger populations of people are good, they say, because in those populations will be found the individuals that will be clever enough to find alternatives.
Unfortunately, one can find plenty of examples where this sort of confidence was an utter failure. Ruined cities are found around the world. It seems clear that people in those situations didn’t feel they were building something that was doomed, or they wouldn’t have done it. But it was doomed. And probing about often shows how resources were depleted. Jared Diamond, (The Third Chimpanzee, Easter Island) has reported about this, he is not alone. The garbage dumps excavated by archaeologists show how diets changed, animals killed off, and size of the trees cut to build with shows the decline of forests, the presence and absence of pollen grains in sediments show how things were reduced to dust and ashes. Bones of the people tell stories of declining health.
So, if it has happened before, it is clearly not impossible to happen again. The clever people in those situations failed. And I see nothing about the present situation to make me feel that there is anything we have learned to change the equation. The societies of the earth are nearly totally dependent on fossil fuels that they burn far faster than they are replaced, and are polluting areas far faster than the pollution can be broken down. And in size, the situation is far more grim than ever in the past. In the past, these cities were isolated cases, the people probably died in large numbers, but they could also flee to places that were greener. This time, most all the world is involved. There is no place favorable to the life of people that isn’t crammed way past sustainable carrying capacity, we will look at this in more detail in the chapter on agriculture.
A more sober approach to technological advances, is not to bet on them until you have them, and the use of them is clearly sustainable. Jumping off of a cliff, expecting to invent and build wings on the way down, is not a good strategy.
5. Reproduction
Reproduction should be done in balance with resources. It takes a society to raise a child, children are energy expensive, and even adults cannot take care of themselves without the support of a larger society. So the number of children born should logically be an affair of society, not of individuals or couples.
Once again, simple logic, and people strongly resist acting on it.
There are some instincts involved with reproduction that are very strong. One big problem is that we have a sexuality that is based on conception happening by chance, no estrus as is generally found with other sexually reproducing organisms, and so we generally have a large libido. Another instinct is a desire for this sex to be private, hidden from the rest of the group. Why people have the instinct for sexual privacy is not clear. Lots of speculation is possible. What is clear, is that the instinct exists. Many people would just about rather die than have their sexual life exposed to other people. It is a cross cultural phenomena. Yet many animals don’t care at all. It is an interesting problem, to see how this may have come about in people. But not something to worry about here. It exists. And starting from this desire for privacy, the number of children born is also felt to be private, without regard for the logic of interdependence, and the need for a sustainable population. This used to function, when people could reproduce as much as they could, and disease and war and accidents constantly trimmed our numbers. But we have learned how to keep people alive better than before, and are feeding and sheltering people in unsustainable ways, so things are out of balance as a result.
If any organism overpopulates, the individuals that can put less energy into reproduction, and more into just living past the intense competition of collapse, will be favored for survival. We see the results of this kind of feedback arrangement, with how predators reproduce, and how their prey reproduces. Predators typically put lots of energy into hunting, less into reproducing. Prey animals put more energy into reproducing, less into finding food. This gives a model of behavior to people who have the ability to follow it. Most are likely to find the desires for reproduction to be overwhelming to their sense of reason. That’s a big reason why we have the problem. As I find myself saying over and over, the logic is not particularly difficult. What is difficult is that people don’t want to hear it.
6. Logic
People who cannot accept logic are likely to die, given a premise that our environment functions according to logic. Survival is of the fittest, and inability to see reason is like being blind. With people who must live in a social group, then the social group is always being tested for it’s ability to act appropriately. It must be strong with it’s psychological bonds to each other, and yet able to let go people who have lost their strength. People get old and cannot function, they get broken by accidents and disease. The energy situation says that it doesn’t make sense to spend more energy on healing people than you would spend on raising a new adult from conception. Since often you can save someone with vastly less energy than it would take to raise a child, this is a very desirable thing to do, but with many situations of age or brokenness, it is impossible, and it is better to let such people die, and put the energy into replacing them. Like many of the other things covered here, the logic of this is clear, yet it is also clear that the emotional attachments that people form makes it difficult for them to listen to it.
One would expect that people who can hear and act on such logic will be more fit to live than those who are trapped into illogical actions by their emotional drives.
It is often proclaimed that people are beyond further evolution. Or that the universe sometimes acts not according to reason, that cause and effect can sometimes be set aside, that miracles can happen. If one accepts the premise that miracles don’t happen and that it is not energy efficient to try to force behavior, then really there is not much more to say or do. As a social creature who wants to live, then I feel the desire to at least tell people the logic of these things. If they can hear it, good, we can work together. If not, I’ve done what I can.
Read more from Arthur Noll’s Harmony
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