[onlooker]

In fact Ibon you are in essence saying that our relation with Mother Earth and each other has been unethical and we needed the stick to remind us of this. So what we have had for 200 years or so is a view of Earth for what we can extract from it and what it can give us and in a way that is how we have viewed each other. We have used Earth as we have used any of the ephemeral objects we have created. To be used and discarded. I think most would agree that the limits to growth and the OP will reign in humanity. What to me is the more salient point is how to never again repeat our mistakes. Determining ethics is about determining what things we value in this life and what things not so much and acting accordingly . So consequences will be the catalyst for great changes but we must understand and be conscious of our ethical choices in order to learn why this all occurred. Why we decided to so use and abuse the Earth, why we created such an unequal and unjust worldwide political and economic system. Or else lessons will not be learned and mistakes may be repeated in the future. If we are given a second chance, I hope we will be humbled and brought to our knees so that we can collectively value Earth, each other and ourselves enough to never go down this same path again.

[Ibon]

In fact Ibon you are in essence saying that our relation with Mother Earth and each other has been unethical and we needed the stick to remind us of this. So what we have had for 200 years or so is a view of Earth for what we can extract from it and what it can give us and in a way that is how we have viewed each other. We have used Earth as we have used any of the ephemeral objects we have created. To be used and discarded. I think most would agree that the limits to growth and the OP will reign in humanity. What to me is the more salient point is how to never again repeat our mistakes. Determining ethics is about determining what things we value in this life and what things not so much and acting accordingly . So consequences will be the catalyst for great changes but we must understand and be conscious of our ethical choices in order to learn why this all occurred. Why we decided to so use and abuse the Earth, why we created such an unequal and unjust worldwide political and economic system. Or else lessons will not be learned and mistakes may be repeated in the future. If we are given a second chance, I hope we will be humbled and brought to our knees so that we can collectively value Earth, each other and ourselves enough to never go down this same path again.

Onlooker, I do not believe that human ethics stand independent of ecology. We are no different than a grizzly bear on a salmon run. Now just imagine how bears would handle a salmon run that lasts 200 years? We would have a lot of bears taking a quick bite out of the fattest part of the belly throwing the rest of the fish away. What is the incentive for the bear or human to use all the parts of the fish efficiently?

In the history of our species we never had anything equivalent to the last 200 years of fossil fuel use. This relationship with abundance is new. You cannot expect ethics to evolve out of thin air around sustainable use of resources. It needs to be honed with consequences. If these consequences are combined with say the reason and logic that AD proposes this gives us the first opportunity to consciously self regulate. The consequences therefore will act as a catalyst toward cultural self regulation.

Nature always regulated for us in the past with disease and famine. Our predators. We have now bred and consumed to the point of human overshoot taking us out of abundance and back into this baseline historic relationship with nature. Here is where I have a different philosophy around climate change and peak oil. I don't fear them. I embrace them for they are forces that break the hubris. The consequences set the stage to implant into our culture (economic system, religious institutions, government) ecologically balanced self regulation. There is of course the risk that the consequences of climate change are so disruptive as to be quite calamitous. That's fine. Up to a point the deeper the calamity the deeper the foundations get shaken and the more profoundly we can modify our macro institutions toward sustainability. If we go extinct in the process it will be clearly in the fossil record for the next sentient species that arrives inevitably at this impasse. I am more optimistic in this regard that we will get through the ecological disruptions we are causing.

We are not a flawed species. We are an ignorant species regarding self regulating with abundance. We are about to be given the opportunity of wisdom. This set of circumstances never happened before. For that reason we cannot judge ourselves to harshly for having been unethical toward our mother earth. As I said the reintroduction of natural limits is the equivalent of a mother scolding its child for biting her nipple.

By the way Onlooker you guessed it. Ibon means bird in Tagalog, I assume your wife informed you.....

[onlooker]

Yes Ibon she pointed that out. I like the context of the word "ignorant". We abused Earth because we could given the bounty made possible with FF. That registers in a logical way, we should have been more circumspect and wise in a ecological sense. Yet I am left with the disquieting gap between could and did. What made Man so eager to rush into a frenzy of materialism. I posited earlier in one of my posts that it reveals to me a certain dysfunction or emptiness in humans which I attribute to not have a inner peace and not being content. It is as though we needed to create this juggernaut to prove to ourselves we could and to let superficial consumerism and wealth accumulation try and satiate all our wants and needs. In fact those wants and needs we have had most I think would most be satisfied living in a world that is virtuous in as much as possible. One whereby justice, beauty, truth, caring and love were the rule rather than the exception. Needs and wants beyond material. AD speaks of our arriving at full consciousness, well a byproduct of this is that we can now clearly see what is the ideal. As the Bible states "Man does not live by bread alone"

[SeaGypsy]

The idea that humanity deliberately set about trashing the planet is also hubris. The metaphor of the 200 year Salmon run & consequential activity among bears is totally apt. We are among the bears noticing there are starting to be less fish, but still more & more bears. At this point bears generally have evolved without a language for "Slow down & get ready to Stop!" So those of us who can see what is coming have no effective method of communicating to the billions of happily breeding bears behind us. This is why the mechanics indicate there will not be a mass enlightenment, but there will be a dieoff. Despite our amazing abilities to communicate, we are still mostly overwhelmed with our instincts- while the are plenty of salmon, get fat & make babies. Thinking & planning & consequences are sidelines, hobbies for intellectual middle class & businesses. We see salmon in reach, we hunt, we make happy, no consciousness required.

[onlooker]

That is very true Sea, consumption and growth have a momentum all their own and have been made possible precisely because of our base instincts. So I think you and I are agreeing with Ibon that only consequences can stabilize this planet yet those very consequences promise much hardship and die-off. My point about virtuous ethics is that reasoning has the fatal shortcoming of not being able to orient us sufficiently in the world that will be. Even as beings with reason we still have reached this point. To not repeat history, I believe that very strong ethical imperatives must be established. Neither crude tyrannically enforced edicts nor the reasoning of Man can lead humanity well into the future. Only a strong ethical foundation to me can stand the test of time. Or to say it differently our base instincts can only be overridden with a more enlightened ethical and moral foundation.

[SeaGypsy]

The new ethics will be developed in relative isolation post die-off. There will very likely be some spiritualist aspect IMO as the trauma of die-off will echo down through the ages. Traumatised people tend towards religion generally & any survivors will have a whole lot of grieving to process. I don't believe for a second there will be a global ethical shift before die-off gets well underway, just as we have been unable to enlighten ourselves of the most obvious of evils- the military industrial complex, we will not rid ourselves of idiotic capitalist tyranny until an undeniable crisis occurs, most likely about the same time as economic failure brings about mass food shortage & energy availability prevents broad reach by government anywhere.

Those of us who can see what is coming have few choices. Give up & live & let live, accept the inevitable (holding your dying child/ grandchild, watching the world crumble to a living hell). Get you & yours wherever you see your best chance of getting through the looming bottleneck & get to prepping. Form cohesive collectives with clear objectives to form lifeboat communities.

The first choice involves no ethical dilemma. The second required a rejection of mainstream ethics for a familial ethic, naturally not much business of anyone but the participants. The third option involves nothing new & fancy in terms of ethics, simply a choice of old standards tweaked to suit the new community.

Forming ethics is not rocket science, it's human nature. Confusion about ethics is a product of the artifice of society at large replacing (more failing to replace) our anthropological social nature. If you get the group size right, get the standards of debate & decision in place, pool significant percentages of wealth & income, the world opens up in a whole new way. In fact this being a very rare event is an absurdity. How difficult is it to develop the ethic to fight back against being enslaved under the rentier economy?

[SeaGypsy]

The very earliest days of what became the Christian Church(es?) spell out how to get a movement going. Messianic Jews in the book of Acts had a pretty good handle on it.

[evilgenius]

So AD, given that 'landed wealth' is the primary basis of the rentier economy no developed country is going to willingly forgo: a revolutionary position on land holding is mandatory. The breathing space of direct control of collective surplus through rebellion against the land control system is the only way to begin to establish a truly collective economy. A side door may be for wealthy benefactors to freely hand full control to collectives, as has happened occasionally. However the lack of such a benefactor should not be an insurmountable object to establishment of collectives in the way it is.

A legal pro-forma needs to be designed to support establishment of alternative tenure. This needs to be done at the top brass legal level, with challenges ready for every level of the legal system, which should buy at least a decade of time for the emergent claimant collective to become established & to spawn further such land rebellion communities.

would you agree?

Absolutely SG. There are no fixed approaches to the nuts and bolts as long as we have grasped the core issues as you eloquently summarised. The next step would be to let momentum build up, tackling the legals for tenure is dead on, and of course, the structures as Ibon contemplates. For my contribution, I will kick off at my end and probably borrow ideas from others. I think if as many of us can kick the ball off so to speak in our corner of the globe, its a start..like you said, its getting the bull out of peoples heads.

I think this amounts to the same old land grab politics seen throughout history. In the case where man emerged from feudal society it once applied. Post-Capitalism, I don't think it does anymore. What you tend to get with this is, instead, a favela, which is a microcosm of all of the problems extant around it. Even worse, you might wind up creating a favela out of an entire country.

Favelas exist because the people who live in them don't have economic suffrage. They aren't connected to the money supply in a meaningful way, such that what they want matters. Aside from that they have all of the same problems that other communities do, and worse even because their lack of economic suffrage can disenfranchise them in terms of policing, utilities and a political voice that speaks for them as a coherent people. It depends upon the society you find the favela in, somewhere in South America or South Africa, or even squatter's cities in the US what the extent of the disenfranchisement is likely to be, but in all cases it seems associated with a disconnection or lack of relationship to the money supply.

[onlooker]

This is what I like actually the most about communal Socialism or Marxism. The idea of doing away with the notion of money in terms of the ability to be hoarded or to be lacking. Ideally, people would not be paid in any currency rather they will be compensated for productive contributions to society. Meaning all the needs will work in this way, people as long as they are productive members of society will have their material basic needs taken care of. The whole idea of greed for material tangible possessions will become obsolete. Communal activities will allow people to engage in leisurely pursuits which they may fancy. So possessions will not exist except for some personal inexpensive objects which people need on a daily basis ie. think hygienic stuff, medicine etc. I know you guys will probably see this as pie in the sky rhetoric but I believe the great upheaval to come will provide mankind a chance to do over certain aspects of society and one that must be changed is the existence of money and possessions. In a future society most things will not be possessed but rather shared by all and utilized by all.

[radon1]

This is what I like actually the most about communal Socialism or Marxism. The idea of doing away with the notion of money in terms of the ability to be hoarded or to be lacking. Ideally, people would not be paid in any currency rather they will be compensated for productive contributions to society. Meaning all the needs will work in this way, people as long as they are productive members of society will have their material basic needs taken care of. The whole idea of greed for material tangible possessions will become obsolete. Communal activities will allow people to engage in leisurely pursuits which they may fancy. So possessions will not exist except for some personal inexpensive objects which people need on a daily basis ie. think hygienic stuff, medicine etc. I know you guys will probably see this as pie in the sky rhetoric but I believe the great upheaval to come will provide mankind a chance to do over certain aspects of society and one that must be changed is the existence of money and possessions. In a future society most things will not be possessed but rather shared by all and utilized by all.

Money will go at some point on their own, no need to accelerate this process artificially. They are already showing signs of fatigue.

The question is, what do we do once the money are gone. As Mr. G puts it, "Money is substitute for knowledge". There are vast amounts of information and knowledge that are hidden behind a facade of any simple price signal. This makes our life incredibly easy. But as soon as the money are gone, we have to be able to process this information and handle all this knowledge instead of reading the simple price signals. Or else.

By the way, this actually has a direct relation to the po discussions like eroi, or climate change discussion on this web site. We think that we have all the date for making conclusions, but there is no guarantee that we are not missing something material. Eroi logic seems to be telling us one thing, but the actual things may be developing in a bit different direction. AGM logic tells us one thing, and again the observations show that our knowledge may still be incomplete. As long as money are involved, we don't have to care, as the price signal will deliver us a complete picture without our having to have all the underlying information and knowledge behind it. Where the money are absent, we are likely to be wandering in a fog of uncertainty.

[onlooker]

Good post Radon, but I have a little problem with your observation that money or in this case price is delivering a complete picture. For example, corporations are notorious for creating what is referred to as externalities which are costs that the society or future gets burdened with such as environmental degradation. So then when we pay for products are we really paying the "right" price considering the damage being done to Earth. Also, US subsidizes tremendously fossil fuels so that tends to distort the real price of gas and oil. Finally, we have a measure in this country called GDP, acronym for gross domestic product. This measures all income generation of all kinds. Economists cite this to show the economy is growing. Well this is a bit misleading or warped in the sense that some of the income included is from healthcare, accidents, new prisons built etc. You get the picture that this measurement equally measures income generated from bad things happening to people or bad conditions being perpetuated. So R, my overall point being that while I understand your point, money does not truly give the total picture or even sometimes the best picture.

[radon1]

Good post Radon, but I have a little problem with your observation that money or in this case price is delivering a complete picture. ..

Misses the point.

Price tells you what to do; absent money, you are lost.

[americandream]

This is what I like actually the most about communal Socialism or Marxism.

Radons point is s subtle one. Money gives life to our objectification of things; Without things we are bereft, in relations such as families and in society generally. Money articulates our sense of being, the nature of our Consciousness. Thus without it we are lost.

Deepening this objective relationship further subjectified (evolution contemplates nothing in the use of things relations other than need) by injecting mysticism or fickle sentiment into that mediation does not rid us of the problem, its simply masks it whilst the underlying mechanisms tick away quietly, in some instances such as the baby booming New Ageism; deriving a new life as the mysticism further amplifies the commodification of consciousness.

The process of objective conscientisation is very challenging. It holds out the promise of a fully rounded man, it challenges us in how we articulate it however. It does not suffer fools gladly.

[ennui2]

We are not a flawed species. We are an ignorant species regarding self regulating with abundance. We are about to be given the opportunity of wisdom. This set of circumstances never happened before.

It has, regionally, hence Tainter Collapse of Complex Societies.

I don't think the way information gets passed along from generation to generation, culture to culture, language to language, facilitates learning from our mistakes.

I mean, in a real malthusian event, I suspect that there will never be a truly global and universal narrative about what the root cause was, and the moral of overshoot will just be one among several more comforting stories, many with a shocking amount of religious fantasies sprouted up about it.

Maybe some people will claim that the earth moved out of its orbit or some other BS that can no longer be proven due to technology sliding back to the dark ages. In an absence of data, we tend to want to make things up out of thin air. Our imagination is a two-edged sword.

Think of the Morlocks and the Eloi in The Time Machine (movie version). None of them had the perspective to understand that it all happened due a nuclear war, or the apes in the original Planet of the Apes. They felt the way things were was how things were always meant to be. No lessons to be learned. The new normal.

[Ibon]

We are not a flawed species. We are an ignorant species regarding self regulating with abundance. We are about to be given the opportunity of wisdom. This set of circumstances never happened before.

It has, regionally, hence Tainter Collapse of Complex Societies.I mean, in a real malthusian event, I suspect that there will never be a truly global and universal narrative about what the root cause was, and the moral of overshoot will just be one among several more comforting stories, many with a shocking amount of religious fantasies sprouted up about it.

I pretty much agree with this which is why this is only an opportunity. . Consequences have to wound but not kill. Calamities that hurt enough to force capitulation on solutions but not fatal to the culture, otherwise there will be very little lessons learned to be passed on to a collapsed population.

It's kind of related to predator and prey dynamics. Predators make their prey stronger when selecting out the weak and old. On a cultural level consequences to human overshoot can select out the imbalances in the system that make modern consumption culture unsustainable as long as they are not severe enough to undermine the very civilization.

Analogies can be helpful but are in the end just analogies. I was thinking of another one. When a body is wounded it can go into shock, preserving vital organs at the core while healing. If climate change ends up being the consequence with the greatest impact, we will see certain bio regions suffer disproportionately. This process will be very destabilizing to global capitalism, especially as nations fall back to dealing with domestic crisis. This will throw quite a wrench into non essential consumption which currently drives global capitalism.

Too much chaos added to the system makes predictions impossible.

We don't know where we are heading.

[evilgenius]

What money does is capture the "Instant Picture". As such it serves as an arbitrage agent for the value of things which are changing in time in relation to each other. The instant picture does not take into account anything outside of its own particular slice of time. I think, whether that be the slice pertinent to an arrived price for a very slowly moving object of value or something more quickly moving and how those two ought to be properly juxtaposed is up to some future Nobel Prize winner really. Suffice it to say the price in the moment is the price we are looking at, and it has a lot to do with the supply of money and how fast money can be said to be moving in relation to a particular object's price discovery. It doesn't, either fortunately or unfortunately, take into account future costs, like environmental damage. Wise companies may set aside a contingency, knowing that they will have to face some potential penalty, but the law doesn't require their accounting to mark anything that can't be perceived in some rational manner that is pertinent to the moment(except for allowance accounts etc. which are closed and re-opened yearly). Instead those costs are allocated in a future time, when they effect an industry so much that it will probably, as in the case of severe environmental impact, go out of existence in a manner that will then be hugely accountable to those costs.

Also, not to have any money at all virtually eliminates accounting for objects of value which track from a prior period of time. You can't purchase a used book from a used book dealer unless you do them a favor of some kind. Well, how will that incentivize someone to collect a vastness of used books? One person will only need so many favors. Hence the value of a single used book will likely be too high, even if you spread out the knowledge of who is holding all of the used books and keep track of what favors those people may need. That is also an instant picture, but one that will be more expensive, in most places, than the one that money provides. After all, when you see what kind of favor needs doing how much training(or horse trading) will you have to put yourself through in order to accomplish it? The casual purchase of used books might be severely affected.

You have to understand, it isn't money itself which is so bad, but the love of money that is the root of all evil. Money is just a tool.

[Oneaboveall]

Here's an interesting article:

Now, as Greece (and the rest of Europe) catches its breath, Mason has returned to Britain to promote his new book, “PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future“. It’s not a work of reportage, but of wide-ranging historical and economic analysis that is inspired by Marx’s analysis of capitalist social relations, but also goes some way beyond it (in ways, he acknowledges, that might not find favour with some of his friends on the far left). The book is both an analysis of the crisis of what Mason calls “neoliberalism”—his shorthand for the version of highly financialised capitalism that has operated in most of the developed world for the past 30 years—and an attempt to imagine what might replace it.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs ... ist-future

[Ibon]

You have to understand, it isn't money itself which is so bad, but the love of money that is the root of all evil. Money is just a tool.

Poverty is a prison. Too much money is a prison. A little bit of money as an enabler of experience and to free one from being a wage slave is the happy medium. The problem is most folks fly right by that happy medium and go right into being imprisoned, forsaking the love of freedom for the love of money itself.

[onlooker]

So true, what is also the problem with money in the world we live in is its so unevenly distributed. This creates resentment and envy. Of course the worse is not having any money or very little as we have monetized almost everything in the world.

[evilgenius]

You have to understand, it isn't money itself which is so bad, but the love of money that is the root of all evil. Money is just a tool.

Poverty is a prison. Too much money is a prison. A little bit of money as an enabler of experience and to free one from being a wage slave is the happy medium. The problem is most folks fly right by that happy medium and go right into being imprisoned, forsaking the love of freedom for the love of money itself.

Which brings up the question, what is free will?

Most people think free will is simply the ability to do what you want when you want. I like Christopher Hitchens better on this. I have to paraphrase him. He said something to the effect, if we think that free will is what separates us from the animals, then doing what we want when we want is not free will. All of the animals do that too. So, you see, being able to have that shag or see that new thing or buy that product in a right now satisfaction of your desires is not actually an exercise of free will. What it really is amounts to the ability to form an understanding of personal ethos. Seen in this way, freewill is probably best understood when a person says 'no' borne out of a sense of personal understanding of what is ethical. To form a personal ethics and act according to it is free will.