Green Economy Plus 29mar2010

GREEN ECONOMY: There Really Are Non-Trivial
Behavior Changes With Which We Can Approach

Having a Sustainable Civilization…
Draft Table of Contents Outline
Acknowledgements and Heads-up
Part 1
Introduction
What is (what are the “givens” and why; discovered truths and limitations of present system)
Green Economy
The oxymoron of “sustainable economic growth”
True sustainability is not possible except with tiny human population
Practical sustainability can be approximated
Why things are they way they are… Qui bono?
Human Nature
Examples
“Climate Change”
Lobbying
…
Part 2
Four Old Paradigms to Outgrow and Replace
Constructive sedition
What to do to work with the “givens” to accomplish what should be happening
A “Systems Polity” versus a “Process Polity”
How to change the way we deal with the “givens” in a “Systems Polity”
Return to an empirical human-values-centric public morality
(A common theme/meme these days, but usually offered without specific means)
Recognize the real power-dynamics in our polity
However… Motivation
Enroll the True Wielders of Power
Social and Cultural Engineering-and-Breeding Enterprise
Starting the conversation
“Phase-shift” transitions in human affairs
However Again… Tools and Means
Memes
Part 3
By what operational means? Using a “Social Technologies Toolkit”
As opposed to “social marketing” advocacies without means
Process Tools that are Values-Centric yet Content-Neutral
Social Enterprise Planning (SEP) structured by a
Model for Community Change (MfCC or Model) connected to reality by a
Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ)
Content-Rich Values Tools
Permaculture
Spiral Dynamics
Evolutionary Psychology
Deming and Goldratt Principles
How these tools work together
Part 4
Change-Management Practicum
Pain and Pacing
Organizational Development insights
Appendices [[Separate: Workbook on application of Model]]

Glossary
Quotations
Detail on Social Enterprise Planning
Detail on Model for Community Change
Distinctions
Model for Social-Benefit Sector SEs
Model for Business SEs
Model for Government and Community SEs
Model for Personal Development SEs
What’s your Model for Community Change?
Detail on Metaphysics of Quality
Assembled and written by Alexander Carpenter, Santa Rosa, California, alexander@nmci.com,

with World-cultural and American perspectives enriched in depth and breadth with Asperger-
Syndrome precisionism, truthfulness, and disregard for political niceties.
Compilation and Original Creation Copyrights 2007-2010 All Rights Reserved
With core-material-thanks to Jay Hanson, Michael Rivero, Paul Chefurka, Phil Arreguin, Andrew
Sullivan, Antal Feket, M. King Hubbert, Robert Hickerson, Martin LeFevre, Charles Eisenstein, et
al., including the KillerApePeakOil, DieOff, and TheOilDrum list members. And especially,
profound appreciation to all the giants upon whose shoulders we all stand.
Also thanks to Walter Collins for reminding me of LILA; and to Doug Commings the yoga teacher at
Vertex Climbing Gym in Santa Rosa.
Special thanks to Patience F. Auer for her generosity, courage, and wisdom.
A Thematic and End-Game Heads-up:
New technologies of communications and governance, such as the values-centric, empirical

Model for Community Change (MfCC), can facilitate the re-creation of our polity. With this
Model, the delivery of value is directly connected to the expression of community values,
through feedback-rich functional processes that describe natural relationships. For more
information about that Model and its application as the template for a definitive community-
wide conversation, contact Alexander…
Another helpful modern technology is the sophisticated, well-grounded, values-centric,

empirical post-post-modern philosophy to be found in LILA: An Inquiry into Morals, by Robert M.
Pirsig (Bantam, 1991) — the Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ), in which value is not inherent in
objects, but in the relationships between them. The MoQ is a world-cultural synthesis of
experience and philosophy, of empiricism and generalization; a new paradigm for pattern-
recognition and priority-balancing. Because it codifies values and experience common to all
29 March 2010 Page 2 of 84

human societies, it represents a universal human values-system embedded through evolution
into the human genome, and expressible at any time with appropriate environmental cues and
conceptual support.
Social Enterprise Planning (SEP) — is replacing stand-alone operational tools such as “strategic
planning” and “SWOT analysis” derived from market and business practices. As a methodology, it
can integrate the human enterprise into a less-corruptible and more-sustainable “systems
polity.” The MfCC provides the basic universal framework for a community-wide alignment,
commitment, and engagement conversation that generates and implements an enterprise’s plan,
and the MoQ connects the whole process to sufficiently objective reality (including science), and
compassionate clarity based on human values (instead of market values). That enterprise can be
an individual’s life, an organization’s operations, or a community’s existence.
Applying all three technologies together provides power to facilitate recognizing and
deconstructing our behavioral algorithms while re-creating and re-structuring a conscious,
responsible, realistic, and chosen consensus engagement with our world. That consciousness is
distinct from the amorphous results of special-interest “social marketing” campaigns, such as
politics in general, standardized education, global-warming indoctrination and religiosity, and
justifications for war.

What would it take to accomplish a “Green Economy?”
Part 1: “What is”
Non-teleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could be, or
might be, but rather with what actually “is” — attempting at most to answer the already
sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of why. ... In the non-teleological sense
there can be no “answer.” There can be only pictures which become larger and more
significant as one’s horizon increases.
John Steinbeck, Log From the Sea of Cortez, 1941
This essay is a barely (but increasingly) coherent diatribe about sustainability that seeks to slip
below the surface platitudes and status quo propaganda. To get a better look at what a first
iteration toward sustainability would entail requires an unflinching answer to the question, “What
would a true “green economy” require?” If and how a person or institution addresses the real
issues tells us a lot, and there is less and less time for equivocation. Most are trapped in the
paradigm they claim to try to seek to transcend, focusing almost always on the “Green” part and
not on the “Economy” part, and supporting “greenwash” enterprises with nothing sustainable but
surface that will accomplish little worthwhile but conventional profit (still their principal focus).
Here’s a slogan-revealing, cant-smashing, fluff-exposing look into the hard physical and social
science of sustainability. When a person or institution talks about a “green economy,” now one
can either expose their shallowness or confirm their probity. For the most part, the superficial and
the phonies can’t even enter this conversation, because most have neither the physical nor moral
courage to confront the myths and illusions of our time. We as Americans are disadvantaged for
entering this conversation because political realism (realpolitic in the rest of the world) is almost
unknown in our society since we are genetically biased against it and it’s not taught anywhere.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell (apocryphal)
This diverse “Red Pill” material may appear disjointed (it’s not; it’s iterative and inter-threaded)
and perhaps even extreme; however, given all that we know about human nature — the history
and science of our species, culture, and civilization, this synthesis is the best-fit hypothesis to
explain the facts in evidence. This part is not advocacy; it is seeking to accurately identify and
describe “what is” in a systematic way, so advocacy can become sane, relevant, and effective.
Advocacy happens in Parts 2 and 3.
That “what is” also includes our own feelings and emotions, somatic awareness, thoughts and
beliefs, individual and social conditioning, automatic (algorithmic) behaviors, and expectations.
This trans-disciplinary essay is based more on cumulative direct experience than authority, “social
science,” or the “conventional wisdom.” It is an invitation for you to examine your own
experience to see if it is consonant with the descriptions herein — for you to practice pattern
recognition. To look at this process somewhat differently, this essay is not intended primarily to
inform you or convince you; it is to help you de-condition yourself so you can generate an
authentic personal experience of an increasingly self-evident reality — for you to have more
degrees of freedom to practice untrammeled pattern recognition.
And as always, if you want to understand what’s really happening, watch the action without the
distracting and trivializing sound-track — the chatter, the patter, and especially the twitter. The
truth will become increasingly evident, eventually even obvious. Instead of paying attention to
which myth, ritual, or rationalization the established powers are using, observe their actual

behavior and then try to fit a plausible evolutionary adaptation to the behavior. Instead of
manipulating (“lying to”) millions of people on television, whom would they be manipulating in a
tribe of 200 hunter-gatherers? What function would these manipulators (“liars”) serve for the
group? Lying, after all, is the principal art of politics, as politicians serve their true masters. Qui
bono?
The goal is re-conditioning into a paradigm shift in values, insight, and interpretation, not merely
“learning new material” or advocating a “program” or a “techno-fix.” The result is the beginnings
of a new body of power from asking the right questions so different behaviors can be chosen.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973
A “green economy” must, by definition, be sustainable

That means it cannot manifest a structural commitment to “growth.”
Economic growth has relied on population growth. That cannot continue. This is the most evident
(and most disregarded) truth of all: there is not one single social, political, economic, or
environmental “problem” that is not exacerbated by more people and alleviated (but not solved)
by fewer. When all the problems are regarded together in a system of multiple parallel-and-
converging threads, this truth becomes even more obvious. That population pressures are not a
major focus for the few sane humans still involved tells us that ideology and denial have totally
corrupted political discourse. More on this below...
Ever since the dawn of time, what we now call economic growth has relied on increasing energy
use: from eating meat, from burning wood, from cooking foods, from domesticated animals
(including human slavery), from horticulture, from monoculture agriculture, from coal, from
petroleum, from electricity. With Peak Oil, that cannot continue (unless all that space-alien
technology escapes from Area 51). Per capita energy consumption in the US peaked in 1973 and
has been erratically declining ever since (per capita energy production had peaked earlier). The
mid-70s appear to have been a critical turning point in the history of our civilization; that’s also
when real wages started declining and US national debt (and personal debt) began their
exponential rise, a rise that is reflected world-wide.
Growth has implied improving quality-of-life. That has not been happening for 50 years, not even
for the elites. This may be the best large-scale example of how market values and human values
have diverged. Instead of concentrating on the supply side of the balance-sheet by increasing
production of necessities (as basic “economics” would have it) to meet growing demand, reducing
population will reduce demand. That reduction in organic demand, coupled with conservation and
efficiency of resource use, will make constraints on resources less compelling and less (but not
significantly less) of a predicament.
The limitations to growth from “Peak Oil” are a lot easier to understand, and much more
marketable, than the Tragedy of the Commons. Easiest to understand, however, and most
marketable of all, is the “anthropogenic global warming” cult of “climate change,” whether or
not we can explain it scientifically.
If the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had cut through the fog of ideology
and said, “Cut economic activity by 90%,” instead of “Cut Carbon Dioxide by 90%,” then more
people might have gotten a useful message, for the two are inextricably linked. Our Lords and
Masters, the true owners and rulers of our civilization, who hide themselves from our immediate

view, who operate a neo-feudal regime through several major factions that both compete and
coöperate as they find advantageous, and who are also known by the honorific titles “Oligarchs”
and “Plutocrats,” might have been led closer to confronting their own denial and habits of narrow
self-interest. But what else could anyone expect in a world where politicians and academic
economists would rather die than tell the truth? And that’s only partly because they would be
assassinated if they did. It is totally contrary to established patterns of ruthlessness, short-
sightedness, and self-serving for the established powers to ever pass laws to limit economic
activity, thus there is no hope the ruling Oligarchs can maintain their own present situation or
preserve anyone else’s.
Oligarchy? A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power
and the poor man is deprived of it.
Plato (428-347 B.C.), The Republic, Book VIII
It gets bad. Peak oil means peak food. The much-vaunted agricultural “Green Revolution” in
global food production starting in the 1960s has been as much a black revolution as anything else,
with its intensive reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as petroleum-
based fuels for farming, processing, and distribution. A resource-limited volumetric effect
independent of market-force equilibrium will give us “stagflation” in foods, where no amount of
new or old money (the medium for expressing demand) will be able to drive an increase in — or
even maintain — food production (supply). There just won’t be enough energy to continue to
produce and deliver the food we consume now. Entirely aside from commodity-supply
manipulations (such as the Iraq occupation), monetary manipulations (such as “quantitative
easing”), and temporary artificial price supports, genuine supply limitations will drive true prices
up relentlessly. Any significant increase in energy production will require major reallocation of
social resources and with it a major rebalancing of economic (and thus political) power.
There will be stagflation on oil and other commodities, as well, which will affect the entire
economy with cost increases from substituting more-expensive natural resources for the easy-to-
access resources we have been consuming. If substitute material resources are unavailable or
too energy-expensive, we will be unable to maintain production, much less increase it. Anything
that requires energy or matter to make will be harder to make when there’s not enough energy
or matter to make it with. As money becomes less valuable, its price may go up in terms of
money, but increased demand won’t and can’t increase supply. Producers will be able to charge
higher prices, but they won’t be able to do anything with that additional “money,” which our
“economy” has decoupled from its former parity relationship with the energy, effort, and
material it has represented.
[SIDEBAR: Commodities already in net constraint (for various reasons): maize, rice, fresh water,
ocean fish, rare-earth metals such as Neodymium and …, Indium, Tellurium, Palladium, Barium,
Lithium, Titanium, Tungsten, Gallium, Molybdenum, Chromium, Gold (!), Uranium, Helium 3,
hardwoods, petroleum, arable land, … It is important to recognize that materials shortages
(especially of metals) and difficulty of substitution will aggravate energy scarcity. This bi-modal,
bi-directional squeeze play means we can essentially forget large-scale conversion toward
alternative energy sources, and forget large-scale electrification of personal land transport. Also
see http://www.warsocialism.com/ContinuouslyLessandLess.pdf]
Stagflation will be willfully mis-construed in a growth-addicted polity with a culture of denial

fueled by “leadership” self-interest. In the general economy, stagflation will challenge the
ideology, myths, and sustainability of growth. In the biosphere, stagflation is the new boundary
condition: if you have to dig it out of the ground, it’s inherently unsustainable.
It gets worse. Peak food means peak people. If you are going to grow more people, it will require

more food. If you have less food, you will grow fewer people. Producing ammonia for fertilizer
from coal and natural gas is an inefficient energetic and economic activity that is responsible for
about half of all the protein humans consume. Much of the other half comes from increasingly
exhausted fisheries in seas that may be warming and acidifying. Factory-farming of mammals for
protein is famously toxic to the environment. Here is an example of converging effects — peak oil,
over-population, environmental instability, and climate change. If the rate of decrease in food
production is faster than the natural death rate, people will begin to starve in large numbers.
Population size goes negative through several inevitable processes, and not without a lot of
graceless turmoil (that’s intended as dramatizing understatement about “Peak Death” and
resource wars). More on this below…
Even if a steady-state economy — an economy neither growing nor shrinking — is accomplished, it

might not be sustainable if that state is too demanding of resources (including energy). It’s not
just about growth; it’s about overall size, too. Efficiency of resource use (and re-use) and
conservation of energy become of paramount importance on a finite spherical planet.
Two Growth Scenarios with Math
No intentionally sustainable population of animals (including Homo) has ever evolved, nor
could one. Evolution doesn’t conserve “individuals,” it conserves “genes” and “genome-
complexes” or “modules.” Here’s a thought scenario to demonstrate what kinds of behaviors
will tend to evolve:
Assume that two fundamental "genetic sets" (strains of people) exist in a post-Pleistocene tribe
living in a large village supported largely by horticulture and approaching a critical-mass size
where competition for resources intensifies. For starters, each group is represented by ten
mating pairs, for a total of 40 people in the tribe. Further assume that each tribe loses 30% of
its population every twenty years due to war, disease, and famine.
Members of Gene Set 1 are intelligent, honest, and forward-looking. The mating pairs in this
set only have two children each and limit personal consumption because they know the tribe is
over carrying-capacity (many die of starvation). After 20 years, this set has 20 original adults +
20 children = 40 members.
Members of Gene Set 2 are stupid, corrupt, chronic liars, and only care about the present. The
mating pairs in this set consume ten times as many resources as the first group and have an
average of ten children before the females die of overwork. After 20 years, this set has 10
original adults (the males) + 100 children = 110 members.
A famine kills 30% of the tribe. We assume it affects both Sets equally. Now, Set 1 has only 28
members, while Set 2 has 77 members. The tribe has grown: it now has a total of 105
members. The fraction of Gene Set 1 will continue to shrink through time until it dies out.
What kind of people will be selected during this competition-constrained population growth?
Obviously, it’s people who are stupid, corrupt, chronic liars, and only care about the present.
The ancestors of everyone alive today were selected by a process something like this one,
which includes all the epi-genetic, gene-interactional, multi-level (group and cultural), and
environmental variations active within the system. Alpha-clan dominance and resource-
sequestration only exacerbate the trend.
Our species is not well-equipped to deal effectively with over-population stress because
instead of evolving to avert or avoid previous population bottlenecks, our ancestors evolved to
survive them by attacking (and killing) the competition and taking their resources. It was
nature that evolved to regulate populations, and it does that ruthlessly. The complex human
subset of nature is regulated within that larger, vastly-more-complex system. Both co-evolved

together, with the system tending its contents.
Through a similar selection process, human beings have been bred over hundreds of thousands
(even millions) of years to have a strong tendency to stratified authoritarian tribal power
dynamics, which we now call “religion” and “feudalism.”
Here’s some more math, of an engineering nature:
It would take approximately 50% of the entire present industrial capacity of our country
exclusively focused for 20 years to build the wind-power infrastructure to replace the amount
of energy we are deriving now from our principal high-density energy source, petroleum.
Similar investments would be required for tapping solar, tide, and other ambient energy flows.
Where would the energy and the material to build that infrastructure come from? What would
become of the “growth” conversation under such a regime?
That means that it cannot maintain the extreme resource-use inefficiency of “the
market”
A “market” may be efficient at the price mechanism (i.e., efficient in using money, of which,
ironically, there is no shortage except in our conditioned habits of thought — there are only
political shortages) were we ever in a market not distorted or manipulated by concentration of
power in the hands of a few command-and-control Oligarchs. However, there are no Adam-Smith-
type “free” markets anymore, given corporate consolidation and corporate-government
convergence and engagement (also known as “fascism”). So “price efficiency” is a meaningless
virtue. Thinking mankind will run out of “money” is like thinking we will run out of inches or feet.
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a
point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is
Fascism, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any controlling private
power.
Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, Message to Congress, 29 April 1938
However efficient they are at the price mechanism, existing markets are 50% to 90% inefficient in
resource use:
Financially, this “overhead” is the enormous edifice of banks, insurance companies,

advertising agencies, and all other institutions associated with money, economic competition,
and distribution of resources in terms of money. The most debilitating aspect of this is that the
‘financial sector” actively subtracts significant actual value from the general economy while
diluting monetized value through structural inflation.
When financial-sector profits are 40% of total corporate profits, that calibrates the maximum
theoretical (not the actual) resource-use “efficiency” of contemporary market capitalism at
60%.
Physically, a large part of the overhead is redundant infrastructure, including all the
“competitive” manufacturing duplication and decentralization of facilities for product
development, design, manufacture, and distribution. The overhead increasingly includes
avalanching complexity costs within which plummeting net energy is a major factor. It includes
the absurd losses from “planned obsolescence,” disposability of goods, and “mean-time-to-
failure” designed to happen just before a warranty expires; and the extreme wastefulness,
toxicity, and disruption of the environment by industrial processes — made invisible and
deniable by externalizing costs (and more on this below). It includes diffuse suburbs and the

transportation infrastructure required to serve them, suburbs that take from productive use
the lands most readily accessible to cities. A truly sustainable civilization would only produce
products that are really needed, and those products would last indefinitely. However,
thermodynamically and practically speaking, all economic activity wastes non-renewable
resources, so in an absolute sense sustainability is only an ideal to be approached as best we
can.
Combined, these factors and parameters contribute another, say, 50% efficiency loss, for an
overall efficiency at energy and resource use of around 10%.
The second-most debilitating corruption of the entire “market system” may be the religion-like
ideology of “marketism” (with its co-dependent handmaiden “consumerism”) and its widespread
crippling of social and personal human values. It is important to note that in his various writings,
Adam Smith’s overwhelming concern and anxiety about the fate of the poor and the
disadvantaged are strikingly prominent. To Dr. Smith, the most immediate failure of the market
mechanism lay in the things that the market leaves undone. His economic analysis went well
beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a
defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education and poverty
relief, he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might emerge in an
otherwise successful market economy. Smith and the other classic English and Scottish
economists (David Ricardo, et al.) believed that a business enterprise should inherently be an
agent of social benefit, in that it creates goods and wealth but also has obligations to its
workforce and to society as a whole. We will examine these values more in Part 2.
Lack of clarity about the distinction between the necessity and sufficiency of the market has
been responsible for some misunderstandings and corruptions of Smith’s assessment of the
market mechanism by many smash-and-grab Capitalist ideologues who would claim to be his
followers.
At its worst, this combination of inefficiency and inhumanity leads to treating human resources as
expendable commodities, and exemplifies how “market economics” replaces human values with
market values (denominated in Dollars, Euros, market-share, ROI, etc.). Moreover, the act of
someone buying a car, commuting to work, manufacturing or selling anything solely to “make a
profit” (rather than serve a personal need or social mission) is the part of overhead and waste that
is generated by vanity, ego, and social conditioning in a values vacuum. Unrealized social benefit
is the opportunity cost of “profit.” Financial profit is inherently inefficient, as one look at the
American health-care system will show, with insurance-company overhead at 34%.
Profit is a penalty.
Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the Austrian School
Military redundancy is another example of profitable inefficiency. Yet another is modern food
production: the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of waste
generated by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural
gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging
and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food
energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-
fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.
Every “market solution” increases complexity. As complexity increases linearly, the energies and
material required to maintain it increase exponentially, and overall efficiency declines
dramatically. The marginal return from supporting increased complexity eventually drops to (and
below) zero, and the system (the “economy,” the “civilization”) falls apart. Capitalism can’t be

run in reverse; we know of no way to bypass our genetic mandates and allow that, despite overt
and covert social and cultural engineering, so there is no “soft landing,” only wars for resources,
infrastructure and supply-line collapse, and general disintegration.
The “market” knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This represents the
distinction Karl Marx stressed between “exchange value” and “use value,” with the second
originating in the Commons and the first arising out of scarcity (through destruction of the
Commons, inefficiency and waste, and manipulated resource controls). A green economy must
resolve this false dichotomy and abandon the conventional “market ideology;” since that is simply
politics by another name (and how our neo-feudal Lords and Masters manipulate us). To
accomplish a “green economy” we must fundamentally change the operating basis of our polity,
evolve the net cultural and personal values driving it, and express them in a grounded and rigorous
way.
That means that it cannot continue to hide its inefficiencies and distortions by shifting
costs to un-monetarized “externalities” and hiding them outside an artificially closed
financial system
The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of nature. “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP) and profit
are measures of destruction of the planet. A green economy must have internalized all closed-
system costs and benefits, and expanded the boundaries of that system to include the entire
planet as a Commons. “Natural capital” must become as important (or more) than capital.
Economists in particular, for the most part, have failed to come to grips with the ultimate
consequences of the transition from the open to the closed earth.
Kenneth Boulding, 1966
“Quality of life” itself has become an economic “externality.” Our civilization has monetarized
social, personal, and spiritual values, and has devalued non-monetarizable human and ecological
(“systems-integrity”) values. Not everything can be valued in currency, and currency-value alone
cannot adequately reflect human efforts to express human values with their un-marketable
priorities.
…untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values to

all areas of life are endangering our open and democratic society.
George Soros, 1997
Let us not forget that work is the primary form of capital, and that all work requires energy. To
avoid the inbred tautology of after-the-fact valuation of capital in terms of its own “money,” the
cost of energy must be measured in terms of energy (the key metric is ERoEI — “energy returned
on energy invested”), with proper consideration given to use of other limiting resources such as
land and water, and to opportunity costs such as food not grown on that land with that water.
Many limiting resources are not part of the market economy (they are “externalities”) and will
need to be brought into the matrix. Such an energetic reality-check would facilitate establishment
of a right-sized steady-state “economy” with a new form of cooperative “systems” government —
explicit political decisions not based on concentrating wealth, but actually dedicated to the
common good (a good made more attainable through reducing population as one of many parallel
threads).
Some of the ideas of the Imperial Chinese system look attractive (although not totally attractive)
to advance the common good. Late Imperial Chinese government maintained a viable self-myth as
a “meritocracy” and it was known as “examination hell.” To a large extent, it was a “systems

polity” that was largely values-based. Morals (Confucian, et al.) were taught to everyone —
especially the political leadership, in a classic example of Alpha-class socialization-indoctrination.
Principle-based leadership is a long-term survival strategy to stabilize an ecosystem of fractious
factions of the Oligarchy. The English aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries is another good
example of this. Most Proletarians don’t think dynastically, and tend to not understand this. For
the most part, their conditioned minds are consumed with the operational logistics of their pursuit
of the illusion of social status, also known to biologists as “inclusive fitness.”
The Chinese Imperial system was in principle almost the opposite of our “everything for sale”
government and society. We, on the other hand, have gotten greedy, using petroleum to exploit
the past, and monetization and debt to exploit the future.
That means that it cannot continue to use a debt-financed currency in a central-bank-

controlled financial-and-political system
The global debt-currency system (inaccurately called a “fiat” currency system) is inherently
unsustainable and unstable, requiring pyramid and Ponzi manipulation, endless dilution with
“new” money levered off existing debt, and periodic re-initializing by the feudal elites (the
“economic cycle” of bubble and bust). It totally distorts all relationships between capital, work,
and energy, and between wealth, power, and value. It conceals the facts of political governance
behind the religiosity of economic “science.” This debt-currency system requires “growth” in the
monetary value of assets to absorb the increase in the number of monetary units and conceal the
structural inflation (which the government must under-report) that is necessary for the system to
work for its owners, our neo-feudal Lords and Masters.
Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790 (apocryphal)
We need to dispel the notion that somehow Government is in control of money-making. The banks
create money for the benefit of their ultimate owners, their already-rich Lords and Masters. They
are not acting as a shill for Government; governments have completely ceded this power to them.
We also need to dispel the myth that there is any significant difference between major private
banks and government doing the printing. The upshot is the same, very few people controlling the
system, making new money from nothing, and not distributing it evenly (seigniorage, inflation-
dilution, and “riding down the multiplier”). Money is “created” when a fractional-reserve bank
makes a loan; in other words, our “money” is backed by debt — mortgage debt, consumer debt,
“national” debt, corporate debt, currency debt, debt on debt, debt on debt on debt. There is no
“money,” there is only debt (called “notes”). That these notes can be characterized as “capital”
and considered to be “assets” is the most toxic involution of the disease of “finance,” and the
culmination of our disconnect from reality.
If the American People ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by
inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will
deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their
fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the bankers and restored
to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions
having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Third President of the United States

(Letter to James Monroe, January 1, 1815)
Debt is “discharged” by rolling over into new debt (which defines “new” “money” as the interest
accumulates), not paid or “redeemed” with representative value such as labor-productivity,

precious metals, commodities, energy, information, and other directly useful things. This
represents a limitless increase in claims against finite planetary resources. In other words, the
Oligarch’s “financial system” is collateralizing and selling monetarized “value” representing
several orders of magnitude of the value of the planet itself. The tremendous volume of such debt
simply cannot be redeemed with real-world value. As with all bubbles, this one too will feed on
itself until its Ponzi pyramid collapses, and with it, much of what we consider “civilization,” for
this is the first time that all the other “peaks” are occurring more or less sumultaneously.
The End-Game of Irredeemable Debt
Established economics ignores the effect of irredeemable debt (as opposed to redeemable
currency) on productivity. It watches debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is
happy as long as this ratio stays below 100% by a fair amount. However, what should be watched is
the ratio of additional debt to additional GDP.
The increase in GDP brought about by the addition of new debt to the economy is called the
marginal productivity of debt. That ratio is the only one that matters in judging the quality of
debt. After all, the purpose of contracting debt is to increase productivity. If debt volume rises
faster than national productivity, big trouble is brewing, but only the marginal productivity of
debt is capable of revealing it.
Precipitous decline
Before 1971, the introduction of one Dollar of new debt used to increase the GDP by as much as
three Dollars or more. Since 1971, this ratio started its precipitous decline that has continued to
this day without interruption. It went negative in 2006, a tipping-point forecasting the financial
crisis that is breaking now. In January of 2010 the ratio was at —$0.60 per Dollar. That’s a loss of
sixty cents for every new Dollar of debt. The reason for the decline is that irredeemable debt
causes capital destruction. It adds nothing to the per-capita quota of capital invested in aid of
production. Indeed, it may take away from it. As leveraged debt displaces real capital (which
represents the deployment of more labor, more material, and better tools), productivity declines.
The laws of physics, unlike human beings, cannot be conned. Irredeemable debt can only create
make-believe capital, capital that eats itself through self-trading and “quantitative easing.”
By confusing natural capital and credit, economics obliterates facts of nature. It conceals the cost
of running the debt-breeding merry-go-round. It makes capital destruction invisible. The stock of
accumulated capital supporting world production, large as it may be, is not inexhaustible on a
finite planet. When it is exhausted, the music stops and the merry-go-round comes to a halt. It
does not happen everywhere all at the same time, but it must happen everywhere sooner or later.
The marginal productivity of debt is an unimaginative taskmaster. It insists that new debt be
justified by a minimum increase in the GDP. Otherwise capital destruction follows, a vicious
process of deflation followed by rampant inflation as more and more debt-based “money” is
pumped into the system to shore it up (until it collapses). And if “government” and “the
economy” are joined at the hip or are effectively the same as in the West, then government stops
functioning along with the economy, and anarchy results.
At first, there are no signs of trouble. If anything, the picture looks rosier than ever. But the seeds
of destruction inevitably, if invisibly, have sprouted and will at some point paralyze further
growth and production. To deny this is tantamount to denying the most fundamental laws of our
known universe — the law of conservation of energy and matter, and its handmaiden, the second
law of thermodynamics.
The minions of the Oligarchs who run the banking system can only temporarily deny and defy that

natural law. In service of their Lords’ and Masters’ power, they are leading a blind crowd of
mesmerized people to the brink where momentum may sweep most of them to their financial and
perhaps even physical destruction. Yet not one university economics department in the world has
issued a warning, and not one court of justice has allowed indictments to be heard from
individuals and institutions charging that the issuance of irredeemable debt is a crude form of
fraud, and calling for the punishment of those apparently responsible, whether in the government,
in the central bank, or elsewhere. Although entirely predictable (economists are High Priests
within the Oligarchic system, and judges are employed to regulate it), their behavior in this
regard could not be more reprehensible and unsustainable. Rather than acting to protect a
universal common good, they act as chattel servants of their Patrons to advance and conceal
further power concentration by the already mighty.
The marginal productivity from additional debt is exactly analogous to Joseph A. Tainter’s notion
of “marginal productivity from increases in complexity” presented in The Collapse of Complex
Societies (Cambridge, 1988). As complexity advances linearly, the cost of maintaining coherence
increases exponentially. The energy cost of additional complexity returns less and less
productivity, which eventually goes negative (as has the marginal productivity of additional debt).
Society begins to fall apart in both cases, and that collapse accelerates. Having both go negative
at once contributes to a Perfect Storm of change that is intensified by global climate-change,
Peak Oil, environmental instability from climate change and industrial toxicity and disruption,
potential (likely) microorganism epidemics, and energy-cost- and over-population-exacerbated
resource shortages. Tainter, by the way, refers to himself as an “ecological economist.”
Growth and complexity have always been fueled by more and more matter and, more important,
more and more energy (from meat, wood, slaves, domesticated animals, wind, monoculture
agriculture, coal, petroleum, electricity, etc.). When existing complexity is no longer supported
by energy sufficiency, and “money” growth can no longer maintain energy (and material)
production, society collapses (as it has so many times in history); in our case, blind-sided by an
ideological obsession with "growth."
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a
madman or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding, Economist
The inconspicuous beginnings of irredeemable debt have blossomed into a colossal edifice, a
complex inverted pyramid of debt (in the form of “markers” such as “credit default swaps” and
other “derivatives” and derivatives of derivatives) precariously balanced on a tiny and ever-
shrinking foundation of real material value.
Increases or decreases in the level of money supply are thought to influence the level of
production in the economy. However, this is true only if the ‘externals’ to the economy —
i.e., sources of energy from outside of the money circle — are constant. When the
availability of energy changes, the economy changes in ways not correctable by
manipulations of the money supply.
H.T. Odum in A Survey of Ecological Economics, Krishnan, Harris, and Goodwin,

editors, Island Press, 1995, page 205
This pyramid could remain stable as long as there was unlimited inexpensive energy (or, at least,
the illusion or promise of such energy) and material to represent at least some working value in all
that debt. Complexity requires energy to maintain, much less expand. When the marginal energy
cost of energy goes negative, there is no amount of “money” (whether as irredeemable debt or as
gold-backed currency) that can produce it. The same applies to material goods. Peak Oil means
Peak Capitalism.

So “money” (as the notion is used today) cannot be made “sustainable.” Either:
Money is “limited” (pegged to gold or some other commodity) and ultimately in such short
supply that it leads to war over resources and power (World War One, c.f., Karl Polyani).
OR
Money is “unlimited” (a central-bank debt-based “fiat” currency) and ultimately in such

oversupply that it causes hyperinflation and leads to war over resources and power (World War
Two, c.f., Weimar Republic, Adolf Hitler, and now...).
Next is more war to sequester resources, eliminate excess population, and prop the “money”
system in place (and with it, its owners’ grip on power) as long as humanly possible.
The Straw Dogs are Paper Tigers

“War” is politics by another name. (von Clauswitz)
“Economics” is politics by another name. (Hazel Henderson)
“Sociology” is politics by another name. (Jay Hanson)
“Political Science” is politics by another name. (Alexander)
None of those is “science” at all; they are components of a neo-feudal confusion-and-control

system. One must not call economics a creationalist cult (“creating wealth”), one must instead
refer to it as Darwinian and scientific — survival of the “economically fittest.”
Economics is a “social construction.” Humans did not co-evolve with money or markets. There
were no economists in the Pleistocene, nor “money.” There were “politics,” defined as “getting
people to do things.” Since humans did not evolve with a “medium of exchange” (except,
perhaps, meat for sex), no a priori reason exists for us to have a monetary system and all that it
entails.
Like other religions, economics was invented by rich and powerful Oligarchs to serve their own
interests. Just look to see what institutions hire economists to see the truth of this. Economics
professors and economists are professional dis-information agents who claim that “money” is just
a “medium of exchange.” In a society where even the formal political system floats on a sea of
money, this lie can’t even pass the “straight face” test.
If economics, money, and the monetary system were invented by our rich and powerful Lords and
Masters, why did they do it? Obviously, for political purposes — to externalize and objectify their
whims and commands, to make the rest of the world do their bidding without the uncertainties of
unsystematic lies and more literal forms of force. It also makes it easier for the competing
factions of the Oligarchy to cooperate when advantageous (i.e., when extracting and
concentrating wealth from the productivity of the rest of us).
Money to gain Power; Power to protect Money.
de’Medici Family Motto (apocryphal)
Thus, economics, the financial system, and money has become a “hidden political system” that
pretends to be something else. It’s the perfect political system for the Oligarchs, who make social
decisions that affect us all, are not held responsible for those decisions, and get others to pay for
those decisions with their earnings and their lives. Obviously, the Oligarchs do not want a one-

person, one-vote political system (a “republic,” and certainly not a “democracy”) when they can
have a one-dollar, one-vote political system (an “economy”).
It is natural that the country whose theories of government are the most unrealistic in the
world should develop the greatest and most powerful sub rosa political machinery.
Thurman W. Arnold
Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944) thought the “key step” was to overturn the belief
that social life should be subordinated to the market mechanism. Once free of this “obsolete
market mentality,” the path would be open to subordinate both national economies and the global
economy to democratic politics based on “human values.”
Whole dimensions of what it means to be a human being and be treated as one are not
incorporated into the economic calculus of capitalism.
Peter F. Drucker, Managing in the Next Society
Originally, corporate charters were not “to make a profit at any lawful purpose;” they were a
license to accomplish some quasi-governmental task (with political overtones for the ruling elite)
like “pacify” colonial subjects, build public works that would otherwise require too much private
investment and promised to generate revenues, and do things that could be “plausibly deniable.”
General share ownership among the elites has distributed and diluted (if not outright concealed)
responsibility and eliminated accountability for the cost to the commons and the opportunity cost
to the polity of exercising that license. Rather than quarrel about booty, owners could share even
more wealth by concentration and collaboration outside a zero-sum game.
“Economic change” may in practice be “regime change” with attendant violence and blood
(however artfully obscured) if driven to occur before it happens naturally from evolving culture-
change. Since economics is just politics by other means, then a Steady State Economy must
actually be an expression of Steady State Politics (or some steady-state social equilibrium,
however punctuated). What that would mean in practice in our post-modern world is a great
mystery, but when there is true “green power” practiced in a “green culture” expressing “green
values,” there could emerge a “green economy.”
Red is the Opposite of Green

Our rich and powerful Lords and Masters are animated by, and indoctrinate us in, a form of
religion whose god is the unencumbered self-regulating market. Economic historian Deborah
Redman explains:
Because the order of nature is providential, the free market that reflects natural order also
reflects the workings of providence. In this way the spheres of morality, theology,
jurisprudence, and economics become hostages to nature, so to speak.
Deborah Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science, MIT,

1997, page 237
Like all gods, this economic god is an abstraction; it doesn’t actually exist. Nevertheless, we
evolved to fight and die for such an economic god just like a suicide bomber fights and dies for his
religion’s God. In essence, Western elites are missionaries with the biggest and best weapons.
Even though scientists and philosophers have been pointing out inherent flaws in our economic god

for over a hundred years, we have been — and will remain — stuck in a tight loop that goes
something like this:
First, Western elites demand a world organized around the god of self-regulating markets:
All over the globe, we have recently witnessed a return to religious fundamentalism. In my
view, the return to the equilibrium price-auction model in economics represents a parallel
development — a desire for psychological certainty in a world that is, in the last instance,
uncertain. (page xix)
No discipline except economics attempts to make the world act as it thinks the world should
act. But of course what Homo sapiens does and what Homo economicus should do are often
quite different. That, however, does not make the basic model wrong, as it would in every
other discipline. It just means that actions must be taken to bend Homo sapiens into
conformity with Homo economicus. So, instead of adjusting theory to reality, reality is
adjusted to theory. (page 21)
Lester C. Thurow, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics, Random, 1983
When the failures of self-regulation of these markets become intolerable problems, elites blame
outside “interference:”
There is at the core of the celebration of markets a relentless tautology. If we begin, by

assumption, with the premise that nearly everything can be understood as a market and that
markets optimize outcomes, then everything else leads back to the same conclusion —
marketize! If, in the event, a particular market doesn’t optimize, there is only one possible
inference: it must be insufficiently marketlike. This epistemological sleight of hand is an
astonishing blend that blurs the descriptive with the normative. It is a no-fail system for
guaranteeing that theory trumps evidence. Should some human activity not, in fact, behave
like an efficient market, it must be the result of some interference that should be removed or
a stubborn human refusal to appreciate markets. It cannot possibly be that the theory fails to
specify accurately how human behavior works.
Everything for Sale, Robert Kuttner; Knopf, 1997, page 6
Our Lords and Masters then demand that governments and central banks mitigate these
intolerable problems by cutting interest rates, providing bailouts, regulating every aspect of
society, and if necessary, going to war to maintain the grip of fear of the unknown and of the
“Other” and maintain their own grip on power. This caused World Wars One and Two. Our
“leaders” are now talking about what would become World War Three. They are seeing red, and
intend to have more wars, because they have developed a cultural and psychological “war
technology” that advances their agenda and effectively deceives all but the Oligarchs. One good
example of this is the use of corporate media to propagate official “conspiracy theories” about
“false flag” events to justify endless and unwinable war in the name of “national security.”
Taxes are not raised to carry on wars; wars are raised to carry on taxes.
Thomas Paine (apocryphal)
State-against-State wars are now superceded by culture and economic wars, because the States
themselves are chattel to the Oligarchy, with a few notable regional and cultural exceptions. The
fake but very expensive Wars on Poverty, Drugs, Tobacco, Cancer, Guns, Privacy and Private
Property, Terror, ..., and ... are all systematically designed to perpetuate its “enemy” and the
“special interests” who control it. They also perpetuate the livelihood of the warriors engaged in
an enforced stable equilibrium with that enemy, while providing grist for media manipulation as

“public policy” is defined and re-defined to generate huge profits for the owners and controllers
of the corporations involved. This is intensified by “privatization:”
Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don’t end when the invader can no longer fight, but
when the invasion is no longer profitable.
Greg Palast
After any one (or set of) these intolerable problems have been mitigated or equilibrated, we all
go back to the first step and initiate a new subject-matter loop, whose subject is some
enterprise the Oligarchs wish to strengthen their hold over — a new “War on Whatever.” One
man’s conspiracy is another man’s business plan. And as we know full well, the tools one is
willing to use against one’s “enemy” are the same tools one will eventually use against one’s
“friend.”
Ultimately, there is one fundamental reason why another world war is inevitable: human leaders
didn’t evolve to tell the truth at a population bottleneck (and its consequent wars) — they did
evolve to survive bottlenecks by sending lower-ranking others to die in the trenches. When huge
problems confront human societies, the “leaders” of those societies inevitably resort to ad-hoc
governance, with a constant eye to their own immediate benefit (and that of their clan or
“identity-group”) over that of anyone else, even to the extent of redefining who qualifies as
“human” and who is a “non-person.” Human rights and other flowery rhetoric will thrive — it's
just that “human” will exclude most categories of Homo sapiens sapiens which are not in the
group favored by those with power.
The War on “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”
The present media-conversation about a “climate change” consensus is based on modeling

projections and social engineering, not on systematic data, and not on any actual science of
falsifiable hypotheses. “Consensus,” after all, is not part of the scientific method; it’s part of the
political method.
Multi-cyclic climate change is a very real phenomenon, and has always been happening. It’s
important to always distinguish natural causes from man-made ones, as best we can. The present
state-of-the-art in climate science is inadequate to tell us any more than that our global climate
could go either way (toward more warming or toward more cooling — or toward more cooling after
more warming) depending on our time-scale for gathering and integrating data and which data we
emphasize. That was true in the 1970s and it remains true now, despite considerable advances in
climate science over the last forty years, and despite considerable warming until around a decade
ago. It’s hard to imagine anything more difficult than scientists whose livelihood depends on their
expertise saying, “We simply don’t know what’s going to happen,” much less, “We simply don’t
know what’s happening now.” “Cognitive dissonance” and “confirmation bias” are rampant in this
conversation. This “war” is a political process. There is no substantive scientific “consensus;”
there are legitimate demurs not based on corrupting conflicts of interest, but rather on anomalous
patterns of data and inconsistent convergences. In fact, there are as many conflicts of interest to
corrupt “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) proponents as there are to corrupt AGW skeptics.
Vastly more grant-funding has flowed into the coffers of AGW proponents than into those of
“deniers;” and funding of another order of magnitude has been used to pay for the cultural and
social engineering from mainstream media and government, as factions of the existing entrenched
Oligarchy vie for supremacy.
[SIDEBAR: If one looks carefully, one can see that the entire AGW “controversy” (pro and con, but
especially the pro part, which has been funded by the Oil faction to an order of magnitude greater

than everyone has funded the “deniers”) may have been designed to extend the profitability and
control of the petroleum faction of the Oligarchy into one last grasp of status quo in the face of
Peak Oil; to extend their “Age of Oil” as long as possible, whatever the consequences. This faction
has the active collusion of the government and mainstream-media factions, for all will share in the
bounty. The “deniers” are a shallow straw-dog opponent who have been intentionally set up to be
not credible and to distract through confusion. They provide confused non-science to counter a
covertly-corrupted-science argument. This is called “poisoning the well” by propagandists. As Ezra
Pound pointed out, “The technique of infamy is to invent two lies, then get people arguing
heatedly over which one of them is true.” A third voice uses genuine science to expose the
corruptions on both sides and the political agendas behind them. Also see
http://www.prwatch.org/node/8664 and http://spectator.org/blog/2009/12/04/whos-crus-
daddy.]
Given the unsettled science and the unclear vectors in various global-energy budgets (e.g., chaos-
noise and average temperatures, solar-activity cycles, the Carbon cycle, thermal inertia and heat
capacities, and general environmental instabilities), almost all the current noise about reducing
greenhouse-gas emissions is incremental window-dressing to advance one political position in a
strange pervasive emotional climate of fear-shock and denial-numbness. It may be principally to
advance yet another layer of taxation (the “carbon tax,” primarily for wealth re-allocation and,
only secondarily, to reduce resource-consumption), manipulation (a marketing fad for more profits
and maintenance of monopolies), and political control (from generating beliefs and aligning “true
believers”) — in addition to all the other successful such gambits. The conversation is not
scientifically substantive because that aspect is too indeterminate; a better explanation is that it
is controlled-media propaganda and customized hype to serve a political agenda, one that takes
advantage of a general sense of unease and genuine caring in our general population about our
environment (which is harmed far more by disruption and toxicity from industry and population
than by human-generated greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, so it delivers its promoters an
additional distraction from their other activities).
This AGW hysteria and religiosity is another triumph of pre-scientific Positivism, using
mathematical models to “predict” outcomes we prefer for political (i.e., economic) reasons,
independent of complexity-confusion, instabilities not modelable, and adequate (or not) and
consistent (or not) data. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1953 in a different but analogous context
(economics):
To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions.
In other words, to have any predictive value at all, a model of a complex non-linear open system
with emergent and discontinuous processes and events (such as a national economy or a planetary
climate) must be so oversimplified and constrained by its simplifying assumptions, arbitrary
parameters, and artificial boundary conditions, that it will no longer reflect reality. Even more
troubling, such modeling cannot predict anything that is not already within its paradigm — sudden
discontinuous events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, a
break in the oceans’ thermo-haline circulation (the “Atlantic Conveyor Belt”), or a magnetic-pole
reversal — not to mention cascading smaller-scale disruptions such as Colony Collapse Disorder in
bees, dead-zones in the oceans, resource-wars, implosion of monoculture agriculture, collapse
(i.e., involuntary simplification) of complex societies, and the like.
In the Fifties, “chaos math” had not yet been developed, and still hasn’t penetrated into the
agenda-bound mainstream. It provides us a deeper insight than Friedman’s that such “predictions”
are wish-fulfillment masquerading as science — “confirmation bias” made all the easier when an
audience is habituated to believe in what it thinks “science” is, has no training or experience in
rigorous critical thinking, or has some social advantage to gain thereby. Yes, we certainly can
manifest confirmation bias in true hypothesis-falsifying science, but we have been alerted to it
and are not pretending it’s not a distraction (whence genuine peer review and independent

confirmation).
[Essential Distinctions:
Predictions (extrapolated data with some accommodation to non-linearity) versus projections

(calculations based on algorithms in models) versus scenarios (exemplary thought experiments)
Problems versus predicaments: if a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but
simply a fact, a situation, a predicament — not to be solved, but to be coped with over time,
and dealt with by broadening our approach to it, by enlarging the context in which we hold it.
Thermal inertia: the reservoir of, or sink for, heat in the circulatory systems of the planet
(oceans, atmosphere, mantle). This, in addition to the dilution effects as heat is transported away
from its concentrations, causes delays in changes, and damps them.
Complexity inertia: using sunk-cost infrastructure without including any of that cost in marginal
productivity rates or ERoEI.]
Positivist “science” is not only vulnerable to confirmation bias; it can have a hard time
distinguishing cause and effect — the illusion of post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after that therefore
because of that”) caused by observation sequence and cognitive inertia more than actual events
in the real world. The classic example of this in the present conversation is the connection
between ocean temperature and Carbon Dioxide levels in the atmosphere. First, we observed the
air-temperature rise, then the CO2 rise, and then looked for a connecting cause. Some of us found
burning fossil fuels a politically attractive cause, and attributed both air- and ocean-temperature
rise to that cause. However, the paleo-climate record (from before humans burned fossil fuels)
shows ocean-temperature rise to lead (not follow) an increase in atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
levels. This is just what one would expect from elementary chemistry and physics, which also tell
us that a rise in ocean temperature would drive CO2 out of solution in the oceans and would also
increase the atmospheric concentration of water vapor, which is overwhelmingly (70 to 94+%,
depending on the source) the primary “greenhouse gas.”
What has caused the oceans, and the planet at large, to warm and cool in the past? The Earth's
climate is driven almost entirely by the receipt (largely in equatorial regions) and redistribution
(largely by the oceans) of solar energy, the obvious primary external source of heating. 500-, 210-,
80-, 22,- and 11-year cyclic variations in sunspots, solar irradiance, and magnetic-field
interactions, all well-known phenomena, are strong factors in the variability of earth temperature
(and other cycles are thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands of years long). Other factors
are certainly involved. What is causing climate change in the present, and where is it headed? All
the current solar factors are at 50-year and historic lows, suggesting cyclic cooling and a potential
repeat of the Maunder Minimum (the “Little Ice Age” between 1645 and 1715). Human
contributions appear to be very small, with particulate pollution a stronger driver of climate
change than any CO2 contribution, especially in the northern hemisphere. Occam’s Razor is not
particularly helpful when we don’t know all the factors involved…
If you don’t understand how things are connected, the cause of problems is solutions.
Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
There are very real benefits to the commons from a “conservation and efficiency” conversation,
whatever the actual climate vectors and outcomes: a reduction in use of finite energy (and other)
resources, largely through greater efficiency in conventional modes of use and re-use, so we can
preserve at least some of the remaining high-energy-density fossil fuels to provide the energy for
building both supply-side and demand-side infrastructure for replacement energy technologies,

and to provide a time and energetic buffer for a potential “soft landing” through values-evolving
culture change and consequent physical accommodation to climate change, whatever its drivers.
Fossil fuels are essential as sources of the raw materials for making medicines, plastics, and
petrochemicals, among other things. In both the medium and the long run, conservation benefits
us all more than simply burning these resources. The short-term benefit to the orchestrators of
the pseudo-religious AWG distraction is greater concentration of wealth and more solidly
entrenched political control through generating and regulating fear-driven obsessions, even
greater control of essential (and shrinking) resources, and dominance of the “public-policy”
conversation. Fortunately, that dominance is not uncontested.
The bottom line is that our civilization needs to change some of its most fundamental behaviors
whether or not “global warming” is in any way at all anthropogenic, and whether the present net-
overall climate-change vectors are toward a warmer or cooler part of the natural cycle. In this
light, the standard AGW conversation becomes entirely moot (except, of course, for the most
desperate AWG cultists, who are probably already lost in a shocked fog of narcissistic self-
importance, liberal-guilt projection, original-sin transference, fear-damping frenzy, and self-
righteous sanctimony), and stands further revealed as a political/economic manipulation. The
media-promoted indoctrination and popular belief that human activity is the main cause of
imminent catastrophic global warming is essentially a return to the religious, guilt-ridden
mythology of the pre-Copernican age.
Also in 1953, Friedman said, “Confusion between positive [“scientific”] and normative
[“political”] economics is to some extent inevitable.” In fact, we have every reason to believe
the “science” of economics was designed or systematically re-balanced for that useful, even
willful, confusion to be available for manipulation.
The main purpose of the fiscal symbolism in this country as it existed after the World War
was to preserve the independence of the great organizations which controlled the production
and distribution of goods... As the symbolism got farther and farther from reality, it required
more and more ceremony to keep it up. The business corporation built more elaborate
cathedrals and endowed greater colleges to keep its theology moving along the right lines. …
It was these influences which created a separate science of economics, designed to prove
that it was not organizations but principles which were operating in the field of the
production and distribution of goods. Of course, it seemed important to these economists
just what principles they thought up and advocated. Actually, however, the only important
thing was the little pictures in the back of the head of the ordinary man. So long as they
existed the great organization was secure in its freedom and independence.
Thurman W. Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism, 1937, page 196 (emphasis added)
[SIDEBAR: For an additional contemporary case study in how the psychology and religiosity of
“science” leads it to become politicized both socially and economically to serve prior interests,
see “Does the Vaccine Matter?” by Brownlee and Lenzer in The Atlantic Monthly magazine,
November 2009 (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1). The phenomenon
is inherent in the algorithmic structures of human nature and its societies, and expressed
through individuals, groups, and institutions maneuvering for status and power advantage. More
documentation of this pattern abounds, including the well-known story of how “intelligence”
was fixed around a pre-determined Iraq-war policy…]
The Hypocrisies of Desperation

There is actually something like a consensus among most of the modern “conservative” Statists

that “Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive.” Note the passive voice: “...to be
kept alive” (by someone else, that is, by the government, that is, to serve the interests of its
owners and your owners). This is hardly a self-responsible, self-empowered ethic.
That’s a very long way from “Give me liberty or give me death,” one of the mythological slogans
of rebellious “democracy.” The “culture of life” as the theocons call it does not, alas, mean a
deep respect for human life, from cradle to grave, with prudence as the guide to the grayest areas
at the very beginning and very end of life. It has come to mean an absolutism with respect to
maintaining life and survival — even to the point of absurdity, as in the Terri Schiavo case or
opposition to RU486. And to the other wing of America’s contemporary conservatism — the
authoritarian “Federalist” wing — it means sacrificing basic liberties (such as habeas corpus) and
basic moral principles (such as the prohibition on torture). But it remains a staggering sign of how
so-called conservatism has abandoned what were once its core principles, and shamelessly
manipulates fear of terrorism and adherence to religious fundamentalism to infantilize the
masses.
If the right to be kept alive by the government is the single most important civil liberty, then
there are no other civil liberties. If the government’s primary job is keeping people alive, then
anything which can be potentially perceived as dangerous to life can be prohibited and “warred-
on:” “dangerous” speech, “dangerous” press coverage, the habeas corpus rights of “dangerous
prisoners” held without trial, “dangerous” property rights like the right to buy or sell “dangerous”
products (i.e., guns, drugs, cigarettes, McDonald’s, books, etc.). And this says nothing of the
socialist implications of such an ethos, since the “right to be kept alive” by the government
necessarily implies that the government must provide its chattels free proprietary healthcare, free
proprietary education, free food, free water, and free anything that would tend to “improve” and
preserve an individual’s life. Anything short of death, then, becomes a small price to pay to be
maintained, in effect, as the property of the State. This harks back to royal families owning the
State and their chattel subjects. This “ownership,” explicit or implicit, overt or covert, is an
essential feature of both traditional and neo-feudalism. For one illustrative thought experiment:
why is suicide illegal?
Any general instinct to sustainability, then, becomes lost in an irresponsible ideology of immediate
gain (Dopamine fixes, “Bread and Circuses,” “inclusive fitness,” and even an obsession with an
imminent “Rapture”) that obviates all considerations of personal, social, and environmental
integrity and well-being.
Human rights are more important than national security. After all, what is national security for, if
not to secure human rights? The Constitution of the United States of America lists the rights that
the nation was intended to preserve — against, incidentally, an assault from the same sort of
government that would have us abandon human rights for “national security.” In actual fact its
main interest is in preserving the power and increasing the wealth of its owners. So it contrives a
campaign of hype and fear, and shocks and indoctrinates its people to obey its dictates for the
chimerical promise of security. Sadly, it believes its own lies, and implodes into manic self-
delusion (except, perhaps, for a few ruthless architects at the helm) in direct proportion to its
religiosity. One should never underestimate the power of genetically mediated inter-personal and
tribal automatic behaviors (algorithms), both at the Alpha top and the servile bottom.
[SIDEBAR: Statist, Islamist, Christianist, Marketist... are all a metaphor for each other, and all are
identities and beliefs that are manipulated by ruthless factions whose sole motivation is power at
any cost, even infantilizing themselves as well as their own followers.
The principal function of modern government is to keep people apart.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)]

Human values are more important than market values. “Economics” is the religion of the modern
corporate State, and the new opiate of the masses — even for those already narcotized by other
fundamentalisms. Statist Oligarchs rely on religiosity (the pretense of objectified external
absolute authority — the automaton behind the curtain of Oz) whatever its form or content, and
are not shy to layer it on. Ironically, religion originated out of authoritarian tribal power
dynamics, so marketism and traditional religion are natural feudal bedfellows, especially in their
Statist denominations. This is ironic because of the legitimate pretensions and aspirations of
political philosophy and of spirituality. Add corporatist prelates of the marketist religion owning
the government (“just another big corporation” or “just another profit center”) and its chattel
“citizens” (or, now, “consumers”), and one has a neo-feudal fascism committed to concentrating
wealth and power in as few hands as possible, as ruthlessly as Alphas have ever propagated their
own agenda in history, and with more serfs than ever convinced they are “free.”
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies.
They feed them on falsehoods ‘till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Cartago Delenda Est

Cato the Elder was a patrician member of one of the Alpha clans of the hereditary Roman
Senatorial class, and in a position to have private armies and navies at his command to take
advantage of State-mandated “wars;” in this case, against Carthage, Rome’s principal commercial
rival in the Mediterranean basin. He was also in a position to drive those wars politically
(“Carthage must be destroyed,” an historical example of the “national security” scam), by selling
off pieces of the not-yet-vanquished “enemy” to other patrician Oligarchs acting collectively as
“The State,” with the Equestrian and Proletarian taxpayers and soldiers of Rome heavily
subsidizing the enterprise. Largely unnoticed in the background was the patricians’ efforts to
accomplish personal conquest and gain governorships as representatives of Rome, to loot the
kingdom until they got replaced politically in the Senate (or, later, and similarly, at the imperial
Court), militarily as part of a dynastic coup, or by assassination covert or overt.
Some Roman Oligarchs so fully filled their most wildly imagined coffers that they became
conflicted and inclined to disengage the fray (if not outright inbred and decadent), making them
even easier prey for the next, hungrier band of ever-more-ruthless brigands.
The same thing is happening now over the oil-rich Middle East, as one dynastic clan or multi-clan
Oligarchic faction exploits a credulous “nation” of ignorant and naive people infantilized by
conditioning and blocked emotionally and neurologically near a mean developmental age of two-
to-three years.
Grown men do not need leaders.
Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Diluting the Dollar to death is just setting up for the next regional “fiat” currency, the “Amero,”
controlled by the next ascendant faction of Oligarchs, positioning its own currency so they will
have complete mastery of the polity. Not only have they evolved to define State policy and
sequester State resources for their own purposes, but to negotiate a relatively bloodless transition
to an ascending Clan from another in decline.

Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and
commerce... and when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or
another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of
inflation and depression originate.
U.S. President James A. Garfield
Chinese Imperial policy docked noble families one level of rank per generation unless they
maintained or advanced their rank by playing by the Emperor’s rules. This is the original meaning,
the etymology, of the word “disparaged.” The first thing a faction or Clan does when it comes to
power is block the pathway or loophole which they exploited to gain their power (so no-one else
can come up their base, given that all the prior ruling Clans had each blocked their approaches).
The last thing they do is loot the kingdom on the way out (unless they’ve been finessed or
blocked). Gradually, every aspect of the entire polity becomes locked down under control of one
faction or another.
There is another ritual that goes way back to primate bands in the forest and savanna: in their
natural settings, silverback gorillas and hoary chimpanzees have been seen running the same basic
scam — hyping-up fear of a bordering band of “others,” and then defusing actual conflict through
“safe” Alpha-culture conventions while appearing within their own band to be “defeating” that
“other” band (and exchanging genes through slavery, which was also the principal vector for
cultural and technological diffusion). Competing Alpha Clans (“factions” of the Oligarchy) conspire
together (“coöpetition”) to maintain in “the people” the illusion of external “warfare” to
maintain their primary position through fear and covert internal “class warfare” against everyone
else (and each other when expedient). This is a significant evolutionary behavioral and cultural
advance over the silverbacks who had to run solo with their flock of females and offspring.
Such archetypal primate-band patterned behavior is certainly poly-genetically mediated. It’s a

great example of evolutionary psychology (or “behavioral genetics”) at play — expressing
algorithms deeply embedded in our entire human reality.
This behavior-pattern is just as genetic-derived-impulse driven now as then, with that impulse at
least 800,000 years in evolutionary development (more likely a few million), with barely 4000
years of civilization’s re-conditioning unable to overcome the inbred power of both the aggressive
Alphas’ impulses to command, and the impulse in a different population, the herd, the flock, the
band, the Proles, to submit and obey. Or else. Breeding matters, and please note that is an Alpha-
vocabulary word, not a proletarian one.
The only fundamental difference between this atavistic situation and modern society is that the
serfs in a traditional feudal system knew they were serfs, while in our neo-feudal system the serfs
believe they are “free.”
The collective mind of the serf class with its politically correct belief-structures has imploded
itself with the self-delusion that they are “surrendering” of their own free will to be “kept alive”
by the State, and so it’s not a loss of integrity or sovereignty and degrees of freedom. The
cognitive mind cannot experience the difference between “submit” and “surrender,” although it
can certainly spin symbological froth and frenzy ad infinitum.
The purpose behind any action is to feel something or to avoid feeling something. When a
being is motivated by avoidance to feeling something, he acts out of fear. Fear will eventually
move one into this intellectual level, where symbols have been substituted for feelings.
Feelings are no longer safe. People who have the purpose to create feel; people who have the
purpose to avoid feeling think.

The most creative people not only feel, but they can translate feelings into symbols that will
arouse feelings in another. In answer, the one who is avoiding feeling often imagines the
creative person is enforcing feeling on him, and he usually counters with some act of
resistance. This causes suffering.
What is the meaning of life? Life is. Life doesn’t come with a meaning. You can study the
symbols or you can go out and feel alive.
Harry Palmer, Avatar
So “Iran must be destroyed” is nothing new on the face of the Earth, nothing new at all. In fact,
this entire story is thousands of years in developing. Its contemporary players are simply the most
adept and the most obscure. Iran is “déjà vu all over again” of Iraq, which is a mirror of all the
pretext-driven-and-fear-driving power grabs used by various United States administrations, various
Zionist Israeli administrations, Nazi (and pre-Nazi) Germany, the Roman Empire and Republic...
the list is endless.
[SIDEBAR: Who are those players? Who is the “King of the World?” Who are their Generals and
Ministers? The “richest” lists as a distraction...
Distinctions: Ownership versus control
Trusts and foundations
Dynastic wealth and power versus new riches
Hidden-influence style versus open-status style
The CEO is just another hired hand.
J.P. Morgan
People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any
material part of their advantage.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
See The Global Elite- Who are they? for a look at the second and third tier of the Oligarchy.]
The Alphas are becoming increasingly masterful at their covert rule, as they define the listening as
well as the speaking; the myth making as well as the myth fulfillment. Yes, the 20th Century was
the century of technology, but far beyond the physical technologies like electronics, petroleum,
and metallurgy, it was the century of the technologies of propaganda, socialization, education,
and psychological and social conditioning. Combined, all these have given the Alpha elites mastery
of communications and weaponry, and of the very thoughts and drives of their chattel serfs. They
know what to say and how to be heard with no un-orchestrated noise, since no-one else is allowed
to speak in the “main-stream media.” Our Lords and Masters offer the seductions of bounty and
the illusion of power for the paper-tiger “loyal opposition,” and assassination if that doesn’t work.
Pop Quiz: What two things do U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and Kennedy all have in common?
Assassination is a political tactic alive and well in our Twenty-first Century, perhaps more than
ever. Anyone who is dancing in the highest circles of power is always at risk for his life. It has
always been so. It’s structural: when one is newly and increasingly powerful, one must kowtow to
the stronger. When one is powerful, others kowtow. If the struggle for power is too even and too
intense, and if one knows and speaks more than one’s power can protect, it’s up or out, and out
can be very definitive. There are many deaths that fit a political-assassination profile (starting
with a qui bono test) in the past 50 years (and more); what does it take for naïve Americans to see
that as a realistic possibility much less a routine actuality?

The only sustainability the dynastic Oligarchs are committed to is to sustain their power, even if it
kills them. That it might kill anyone else, or even everyone else, appears unimportant: “We’ve
bred our children to know what to do...” and “We have secrets you’ll never find out...” and
“Trust us (or our proxies, the “experts”), and “Do as we say (or else).”
A Green Economy is Simply Not Possible in our Polity

The Founders of the USA, for excellent reasons, didn’t trust government, so they founded a
government that was defined by and controlled by their own wealthy class — the principal
“minority” whose interests the Republic is designed to protect from the democratic mob. The
main concern of our Founders was how to prevent “the people” from revolting in the face of large
disparities in wealth. They could see what was happening in France and it scared the hell out of
them. Starting with Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10, the design grew out of three core
assumptions:
1. The best way to solve social problems is through economic growth. Growth seems inevitable
and eternal when one has a virgin continent at one’s feet.
2. Individuals know best how to improve their lives.
3. The best way to increase economic growth is to simply ask people who are good at it for
advice.
That’s why lobbyists are absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without
lobbyists, our corruptible-but-otherwise-unqualified elected officials and their appointed
minions would have absolutely no idea what to do.
In other words, elected officials ask the factory owner what government can do to increase his
profit so he will build more factories, provide more jobs, and then individuals can make
themselves better off. Keep giving the rich a greater fraction of the economic pie and they will
keep increasing the size of the pie. This is the fundamental assumption of so-called “supply-side”
economics (now thoroughly discredited through bitter experience).
That’s how our Founders designed it, and that’s how “public policy” is made today:
The policy formation process begins in corporate boardrooms... where problems are identified
as issues to be solved by new policies. It ends in government, where policies are enacted and
implemented.
G. William Domhoff, University of California at Santa Cruz
Our Founders saw the “common good” as the sum of “individual goods” which could be measured
by spending — the more, the better. Today, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures that
spending. It’s literally a measure of money (not materiel, not value) changing hands. What we use
to describe our “Standard of Living” is simply a measure of how much money one spends, with no
necessary connection to our quality of life, or to our purpose in life. As the Marketist ideologues
pursue policies that are “good for the economy” — that is, for their economy — they do not look
to see if those policies are good for the people within it.
Obviously, now that we are entering a decades-long period of declining global economic activity
(in the physical resource sense — not in the currency-denominated GDP sense), most of our
Founders’ core assumptions are being shown to be incorrect. The lesson of the Tragedy of the
Commons is that the “common interest” is neither “the sum of individual interests” nor “any
sum of special interests.”
Biophysical Laws

Thermodynamic laws, theories of evolution, and modern genetic sciences were unknown by our
Founders. Today, these laws and sciences signal the end of our form of government. The first law
of thermodynamics (conservation law) states that there can be no creation of matter and energy.
This means that the economy is totally dependent upon natural resources for everything: it is a
“wholly-owned subsidiary” of nature. The German physicist Helmholtz and the British physicist
Lord Kelvin had explained this principle by the middle of the 19th century.
The second law of thermodynamics (entropy law) tells us that some energy is wasted in all
physical and economic activity. In 1824, the French physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second
law’s concepts while working on “heat engines.” The English Lord Kelvin and the German physicist
Clausius eventually formalized Carnot’s concepts as the second law of thermodynamics. Part of
the second-law overhead goes to maintain complexity, which consumes additional energy
exponentially as it increases linearly.
Our government was designed to require more-and-more energy (endless economic growth) to
solve social problems, but the thermodynamic laws described above limit the available energy.
Energy “resources” must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called
“sinks” (this is known as the “net energy” principle). In other words, if it costs more than the
energy in one-barrel-of-oil to “produce” one-barrel-of-oil for energy, then that barrel will never
be produced — the money price of oil is irrelevant. Thus, the net-energy principle places strict
limits (in the physical sense) on our government’s ability to solve social problems. Although
central bankers can print money, they can not print energy.
Biologists have found that our gene-complexes strongly predispose us to act in certain ways in
certain circumstances. These are “adaptations,” and they operate algorithmically, automatically,
unconsciously, and modularly (as sets). This explains why history repeats itself and why humans
have engaged in war after war throughout history: from time-to-time an environment emerges
when “inclusive fitness” is served by attacking your neighbor and stealing his resources. This social
aggression is further rewarded by the same Dopamine and other neurotransmitter pathways in the
brain activated by sex, food, psychoactive drugs, and intense exercise.
Since our civilization and government were designed to require ever-growing energy resources,
but energy resources are strictly limited by thermodynamic laws and a finite planet, sooner or
later our civilization is headed into the collapse of another global spasm of resource wars. It’s
just a matter of time unless we can improve the internal values-coherence of our polity.
Elections Don’t Matter — What Matters Are Lobbyists
A “genetic” face-to-face algorithmic process called “reciprocal altruism” guarantees that elected
officials and their cronies will nearly always come around to agree with the “suggestions” of
lobbyists and each other. It’s a natural, automatic, and subconscious process. Only a sociopath is
immune. Unfortunately, no lobbyists or even government men represent the common interest:
they are mid-rank subjects of the feudal Oligarchs, bought and paid-for. Our Founders assumed
that the common interest was the sum of individual interests. Our Founders based our system on
the ideas of the French Physiocrats, which were formulated before the laws of thermodynamics
were understood, before the insights of evolutionary psychology, and before the technologies of
the corporation for concentrating wealth and power through social control were developed. Now
we behave as though the common interest were the net sum of all “special interests.”
Local Government: No Public Advocate!
Local government policy begins in corporate boardrooms, too, but additional structural aspects of
our political system guarantee that local communities are powerless to stop the Oligarchs and the
merely “rich” from converting local neighborhoods and that hole in the ground you’re digging for

them into cash.
Our present system of government is designed so elected and appointed officials serve as both
public advocate and judge, a situation that makes it structurally impossible to advance the
common good. On the one hand, “leaders” are expected to evaluate the impacts of complex
economic proposals; on the other hand, they are supposed to be non-professionals — just plain
folks.
The result is that, say, county commissioners can’t personally evaluate the proposals in front of
them with any expert or objective expertise, nor do they get objective opinions or studies from a
public advocate (the government’s professional planners are known to not represent the public
interest, even though elected commissioners are supposed to act as a watchdog on government).
Similarly, even though Supreme Court justices are intended as a watchdog on the rest of
government, in this same regard they have upheld the power of eminent domain for giving private
property to private, corporate parties, nominally for the “public good.”
Yes, commissioners do hear from a few citizens of unknown motivation and expertise who are able
to take a day off work to testify. But since these individuals rarely bring “studies” (with explicitly-
stated assumptions, etc.), it’s always unclear how much weight to give to their testimony.
Moreover, commissioners are acutely aware of their impossible double role of judge and advocate,
bend over backwards to give the appearance of objectivity, and thereby nearly-always give the
benefit of the doubt to a “developer” or an advocate for the interests of the established powers.
Some “reasonableness” can always be found to justify anything. “National security” is relentlessly
the best example.
A good analogy for our present “public policy” system is a court trial composed of a “defendant”
(the public), a “prosecutor” (the developer), and a “judge” (elected officials or commissioners.)
In this analogy, the public has no professional advocate and there is no jury. Moreover, the judge
frequently accepts gifts from — and takes the advice of — the prosecutor (the developer’s
lobbyists).
No one would argue that a defendant could ever get a fair trial with a legal system like this.
Our Founders assumed that since economic growth was always the best way to solve social
problems, the public didn’t need a professional advocate to ever question special interests.
The point here is that since our government was specifically designed to rely on perpetual
economic growth to solve social problems and maintain public order, the political system is self-
reinforcing and literally out of human control. When economic growth becomes impossible — as
thermodynamics tells us it must — then our present form of government becomes impossible too.
Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use
whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most
plausible arguments they are able to devise.
Reinhold Neibuhr
Those after-the-fact arguments rationalize primary behaviors that are complex automatic
algorithms derived from poly-genetic imperatives.
The ACGT Man Behind the Curtain...

When most people look around the world today they see a lot of problems. If they are clever, they
see sets of interacting problems. They see energy and technology problems; they see ecological

and environmental problems; and they see economic problems. If they are somewhat deeper
thinkers, they may see population problems. The simple truth is that they are all suffering from
vision problems.
What most people see as technological or social problems are more correctly seen as a set of
symptoms of a systematic underlying problem, symptoms that are manifesting themselves in the
social and technological arena. In the same sense, what people are interpreting as “ecological
problems” are the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the world’s ecology. And what people
are interpreting as “economic problems” is merely the set of symptoms that are manifesting in the
world’s economy.
The underlying problem is the same in all three cases. It is not merely that there are so many of
us, it is that Homo sapiens is a hyper-aggressive species with no effective predators, the ability to
manipulate its environment on a planetary scale, and the ideological perception that it is apart
from, and superior to, that environment (a projection native to feudal Alpha self-identity). In all
of nature, such imbalance leads to the instability of expansion-and-collapse cycles — Gaian
precursors of the “economic cycle” — as Gaia dances with Shiva. Humanity is its own predicament.
The spreading perception that the core environmental problem is human population growth is
useful, but woefully inadequate. Population growth is just another aspect of the predicament
stated above. One can demonstrate this with a simple thought experiment: imagine that we
stabilized our population tomorrow, at our current seven-plus billion people. Would that fix the
problems of resource depletion, ecological devastation and the economic instability caused by our
insistence on continual material growth? It wouldn’t, because those problems are still worsening
where populations have already stabilized or are even in outright decline.
Addressing any one of the problem-areas — energy/technological, ecological, economic, or

population — would still leave us with problems in the other three. Addressing all areas will reveal
additional problems. When we add up all the individual interacting “problems,” we have a
predicament, a complex non-linear system of inter-related problems. Problems have solutions,
predicaments don’t. We can (and will) tinker around in each and all of these areas, because that's
our Buddha-nature: human beings are innate tinkerers. We will do things to ease the situation in
each and all of those symptom domains.
But none of that tinkering addresses the fundamental predicament, which is that humanity
appears to have evolved without a crucial internal self-restraint mechanism (Our Buddha-nature
doesn’t extend that far).
Our entirely typical evolution happened because, as with every other species, those restraints
were readily available within the environment — mainly resource scarcity, predation, disease,
and, later, war. Because those external restraints were available, selection didn’t endow us with
internal restraints because they weren't needed. In fact, during our early time as a species, an
internal self-restraint mechanism acting in addition to the external restraints would have been
counter-productive, and would have been actively selected out of our makeup.
However, as we developed the physical, mental, and cultural abilities to circumvent those
external restraints — through extinguishing all large predators, and developing agriculture,
mining, medicine, and “social science” — we outfoxed ourselves, because in the absence of either
internal or external restraints we are left with no effective way to reign in our genetic urge for
unlimited expansion and the automatic algorithmic behaviors it generates. All that remains is our
intellectual capacity to foresee outcomes and to regulate our behavior through “reason,” which is
not strong enough to counterbalance our innate behavioral imperatives. Human beings are prior-
adaptation executers, not fitness pursuers: their programming and conditioning are always
stronger than their ability to learn and change in real-time.

Alpha conditioning is very strong, as the selection pressures have been more concentrated and
stringent than for the Proles. Since the intensity of the conditioning and genetic-behavior
enforcement are stronger in the Alphas, their algorithmic behaviors have become narrower, more
specialized, more rigid, more unstable, and less adaptive. Hence the continuous turnover as Alpha
clans become “decadent” and cycle through factions, and the ingrained habit of Alphas to see the
problems as being other Alphas rather than the system itself. And hence the obsessive expression
of simplistic market values over more subtle and demanding human values, and of “inevitable”
apocalyptic end-games over adult relationship with our selves and each other. And hence the
strong ingrained tendency of human societies to feudal structures (whatever their guise): both the
Alphas and the Proles were bred to it.
There may be no hope whatever that our tinkering will solve the real predicament of humanity.
We are behaving exactly as our evolution has defined us, and it’s unlikely that we will stop. Our
challenge is to figure out ways in which our feeble minds can create the conditions for the
continued survival of our species and perhaps some of our civilization, despite both our
unconstrained, innate urge to grow and our glorious but tragic ability to “reason” after the fact.
Collectively, we are barely able even to distinguish these countervailing aspects of our
fundamental nature, much less change them. They are at the root of all our troubles, and we will
need to be enormously cunning to outmaneuver them.
This gives new meaning to the notion “think outside the box,” and requires an integration of
individual and collective thinking, feeling, and action that has not yet happened in our culture.
There are Viable Alternatives, but not Easy Ones

The late Dr. Marion King Hubbert is probably the geophysicist best known to the world’s general
public because of his startling prediction, first made publicly in 1949, that the fossil-fuel era
would be of very short duration, and his remarkably accurate predictions in 1956 that US oil
production would peak in about 1970 and decline thereafter and world Peak Oil would occur
“sometime after 2000.”
His social thesis is that our civilization is seriously handicapped because its two most important
intellectual underpinnings, the science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance, are
incompatible. A reasonable co-existence is possible when both are growing at approximately the
same rate. That, Hubbert said, has been happening since the start of the industrial revolution
but it is soon going to end because the amount the matter-energy system can grow is limited
while the growth of “money” is not.
“I was in New York in the Thirties. I had a box seat at the depression,” Hubbert said. “I can
assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of
monetary reasons. Back then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it’s not.”
The man known to many as a pessimist was, in this case, quite hopeful. In fact, he might be the
ultimate utopian, contributing to a social movement called the “Technocrats.” We have, he
said, the necessary technology, including making use of abundant low-cost energy available from
the sun. “All” we have to do is completely overhaul our culture and find an alternative to
“money.”
This means abandoning two fundamental axioms of our culture: the fear-driven Puritanical work
ethic used so effectively to herd the Proles, and the idea that growth is the normal and only
healthy state of affairs. Hubbert challenged the latter mathematically and concludes the
exponential population growth of the last two centuries is the opposite of the normal situation:

“It is an aberration. For most of human history the population doubled only once every 32,000
years. Now it's down to 35 years. That is dangerous.
“During the last two centuries of unbroken industrial growth we have evolved what amounts
to an exponential-growth culture. Our institutions, our legal system, our financial system,
and our most cherished folkways and beliefs are all based upon the premise [and ideology] of
continuing growth.
“Since the tenets of our exponential-growth culture (such as a non-zero interest rate) are
incompatible with a state of non-growth, it is understandable that extraordinary efforts will
be made to avoid a cessation of growth. Inexorably, however, physical and biological
constraints must eventually prevail and appropriate cultural adjustments will have to be
made.”
Work is becoming increasingly unimportant: “Most employment now is merely pushing paper
around. The actual work needed to keep a stable society running is a very small fraction of
available manpower.
“Since the energy-cost of maintaining a human being exceeds by a large amount his ability to
repay [in monetary terms], we can abandon the fiction that what one is to receive is in
payment for what one has done, and recognize that what we are really doing is using the
bounty that nature has provided us [not God, not Our Lords and Masters, and not our hard
work]. Under these circumstances we recognize that we all are getting something for
nothing, and the simplest way of effecting distribution is on a basis of equality, especially so
since production can be set equal to the limit of our capacity to consume, consonant with
adequate conservation of our physical resources.
“On this basis our distribution then becomes foolproof and incredibly simple. We distribute
purchasing power in the form of energy certificates that bear the identification of the person
to whom issued, and are non-negotiable. They resemble a bank check in that they bear no
face denomination, this being entered at the time of spending. They are surrendered upon
the purchase of goods or services at any center of distribution and are permanently
canceled, becoming entries in a uniform accounting system. Being non-negotiable they
cannot be lost, stolen, gambled, or given away because they are invalid in the hands of any
person other than the one to whom issued. If lost, new ones may be had for the asking.
Neither can they be saved because they become void at the termination of the two-year
period for which they are issued. They can only be spent.
“Contrary to the rules of the Price System, the purchasing power of an individual would no
longer be based upon the fallacious premise that a man is being paid in proportion to the so-
called ‘value’ of his work (since it is a physical fact that what he receives is greatly in excess
of his individual effort) but upon the equal pro rata division of the net energy degraded
through the production of consumer goods and services. In this manner the income of an
individual is not dependent upon the nature of his work, and we are then left free to reduce
the working hours of our population to as low a level as technological advancement will
allow, without in any manner jeopardizing the national or individual income, and without the
slightest unemployment problem or poverty.”
Hubbert went on to calculate that following a transition period, the work required of each
individual need be no longer than about four hours per day, half the days of the year, from the
ages of 25 to 45. Income would continue until death. “Insecurity of old age is abolished and both
saving and insurance become unnecessary and impossible."”
We then see that the proposals for Negative Population Growth should be implemented

immediately, so that the steady state equilibrates at a sustainable level and the per capita share
of available resources increases — a good motivator for behavior change. We also see that all
attempts to reduce the deficit, balance the budget, or pay off the national debt are futile. The
deficit and the “national debt” represent the subsidy the government has paid in its attempt to
keep growth and unemployment at the level of social tolerance. No government has ever paid
off such a debt.
Wealth is not “Created”
One idea that underpins all modern Western social philosophy is that people can “create”
wealth. This basic idea has been the focus of economists for as long as they have existed and
philosophers for thousands of years. The vision that humans can “create wealth” results in an
“ever-expanding pie” view of the world. This creed when applied to population is “the more
creators, the more wealth.” This kind of wealth is represented almost exclusively by “money.”
The opposite vision is that the bounty of nature including its energy resources is the ultimate
source of wealth. Moreover, a vision of energy as wealth, when combined with an understanding
of thermodynamics, results in an “ever-shrinking pie” view of the finite spherical planet and its
human world. More people equals less wealth per capita.
Human beings can create money, and to an infinite extent. As long as we have access to
sufficient natural resources (including energy) for that money to represent (together comprising
usable wealth), we can build a polity that has a purpose greater than acquiring “wealth.” When
resource availability falls behind money availability, we have an infinitely corruptible system in
which any social purpose becomes lost in money manipulations for political power and “inclusive
fitness.” A healthy monetary system closely aligns money with resources, and aligns growth with
success at accomplishment of social ends and improving all dimensions of the quality of life of
human beings.
The steady-state economy into which we are being inexorably forced implies an interest rate of
zero, which means the end of any monetary system configured for exponential growth. The only
way of satisfying the desires of those with less (and securing more resources for the already
privileged) is economic growth, which has “kept the peace” because people have believed that
they were, or could be, increasing their “inclusive fitness.” Without economic growth, the
competition for resources will be seen as a zero-sum game. When growth of actual wealth stops,
people will become violent (as they have throughout all of history). They will no longer be
conditionable into fighting over money when winning that fight will clearly not increase their
well-being (as fighting over natural resources can). The “work-ethic” would no longer be an
ideology to get some people to concentrate wealth for others. The dogma of “growth” would no
longer be useful to placate the poor by tantalizing them with the “get rich” pie in the sky,
thereby suppressing their natural tendencies towards violence.
We are approaching “Peak Capitalism.” We are being forced to completely rethink our cultural
ideas about how to organize our economy and distribute purchasing and political power. Social
conditioning would require a different basis, as would status. Applying the “opposite” vision
would de-couple political and economic power and would leave the present elites with no basis
for their control. They would have to generate another, and that population is probably the least
suited for creative social engineering. Their first instinct will be to maintain control through the
traditional means (largely fear-based) our species has evolved to apply — contrived wars against
an arbitrary “other,” socio-religious manipulations, manic intensifications of Statist
“Federalism” in the United States, and central authority masked as necessary to deceive the
complacent, the conditioned, and the naive.

[United States’ governance was] born with a bias against democracy... ‘Inverted
totalitarianism’ lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing
concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident
elements so long as they remain ineffectual. [Such a form of political power makes the US]
the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.
Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 2008
Hubbert’s synthesis shows there are ways to re-organize the fundamental (and not-so-funda-
mental) bases of our polity. However, getting there from here is no simple matter, and some
polities are potentially more amenable to such changes than others.
For example, Britain’s type of government and different history might have fewer obstacles in
finding a sane, potentially effective way such as rationing to respond to an energy or general
resource shortage. If one is looking for a traditional term for a social system based on the state
taking care of all its people, what has been called “socialism” is a probably the closest. England
has a long history of aristocracy-led “socialism” directly derived from its feudal past, but America
does not.
Despite its secularist rhetoric and prattle about “democracy,” the American political system and
its military are integrated with fundamentalist religion much like Islamist states such as Saudi
Arabia. The British Parliamentary system of government allows minority views to be heard in
government (e.g., “Greens”) but our one-party-two-factions “Christianist/corporate” system does
not. Thus the only voices readily heard in Washington, DC are corporate spokesmen with profit
agendas or preachers with religious agendas.
At the level of appearances, the Oligarchs and their minions would actively hate rationing because
it would demolish their self-myth and self-worth as it dismantled their status displays. Worse, they
would hate it because they would lose their wealth-and-power-concentration advantage (which
gives them their “inclusive fitness”). It would be extremely difficult even for England to change,
because of our human nature. In our one-corporation-one-vote political system, it would require a
majority of corporate board members and their minions to adopt a new world-view and then
believe their social status would increase by giving up marketist Capitalism, and then an equal
revolution to overcome the objections of a hundred thousand fundamentalist preachers and their
minions.
[SIDEBAR: Certainly tens of thousands, and probably a hundred thousand bright technical folks,
including economically trained professionals, know at some fundamental level that our
“economy” is basically one gigantic illusion. For instance, economists have known for certain
that their assumptions and models were wrong ever since Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in
1978 for pointing it out in 1955. They probably also know that it is going to lead to global war
over the remaining natural resources.
So why don’t a significant number of these experts go to the public? Why don't some of their
professional groups start taking out full-page ads in the New York Times?
It may be that their relentless drive for high status prevents them from doing anything that
might jeopardize their social position, and, thereby, their prospects for survival. It may be that
even moderate, normal drives for status are adequate to do that. It may be that the prospect of
actively losing status through apostasy, by challenging the established equilibrium of denial and
avoidance, is adequate deterrence. If that isn’t, then assassination would be.
Historically, high-status people were more likely to make it through population upheavals. In
other words, these bright technical folks are genetically biased to say and do nothing while their

neighbors die by the millions around them (e.g., the Japanese and Germans in WW2). The ability
to foresee a disaster like this coming and change business as usual for the common good never
had a chance to evolve.
Technical and systems insight and moral courage are not the same. Professional education is in
itself an initiation into the status quo, a “normalization” ritual that weeds out, as best it can,
people whose emotional makeup is potentially divisive, or who cannot embrace “go-along-to-
get-along” compressions. A “cult of mediocrity” rules the squeaky wheel. In other words, fear of
being shunned by one’s tribe is more compelling than fear of adverse worldly outcomes from
out-of-control instabilities and reactive and reactionary changes.
So global war is inevitable because the people who do understand the big lie (with few
exceptions) are paralyzed by their relentless striving for, and clinging to, social status. What
other explanation is there for their overwhelming silence? Individual moral cowardice, perhaps,
or simply a collective abandonment of values leading to a collapse of social morality?
Do we have any cause at all to believe that this is not already being engineered, as a tactic
within the Oligarchy’s own paradigm?]
Vision and Spirit

Philosophy can be defined as the uncovering and examining of hidden assumptions — premises that
haven’t been vetted. The entirety of America’s political leadership running ahead with (and away
from) premises they haven’t examined with regard to America and its economy.
They are trying to “jump start” a junk economy, but it’s dead and gone. How many trillions of
Dollars will they flush down the drain before they realize it? When they finally do see the light,
they will face a choice — articulate an entirely new vision for America in the context of the global
economy (that is, humankind as a whole); or stay stuck in reflexive “zombie” doldrums for years,
maybe decades.
One of the unexamined ideas of the Oligarchic-Economic establishment is that economic activity is
solely a function of buying and selling, and that if they can just “jump start” the buying and
selling again, economic health will return — and with it, social accord and cultural vibrancy.
In a glutted market, economic activity isn’t primarily a function of demand and supply. At some
point (which we’ve reached), the pursuit of glut runs out of gas. Then it becomes a matter of
people’s values and the priorities they define. Americans are finally beginning to realize that
things can’t fill their emptiness. After people have enough food, and adequate shelter and
clothing, the market must eventually reflect what they think is important: people’s human values.
It’s an interesting exercise to speculate what percentage of unnecessary stuff comprises the
American economy. The percentage of junk (unnecessary stuff people buy with “discretionary
income” or on credit, out of advertising-whetted status-seeking, class consciousness, or fads)
went from an estimated 35% of GDP in 1965 to 65% in 2005.
That’s a lot of glut, which is a word you never hear in America. Economists and politicians use
words like “overhang” to describe an excess of things. This reflects another unexamined
assumption about economic activity — that it can be reduced to mechanical analysis, terminology,
and correction.
Simply put, the rich and powerful of America have promoted for decades our buying as much junk
as possible, big and small, and have provided seemingly endless lines of credit to do so. The

housing bubble was just the latest, greatest expression of this trend, turning millions of formerly
solvent people into speculators, while selling mortgages to anyone who could put a signature to
paper.
No amount of “jump-starting” will put life back into a battery that’s dead. As some astute
economists (not necessarily an oxymoron) have said, we don’t have a sub-prime loan crisis; we
have a sub-prime economy crisis.
The standard economic conversation revolves around a false choice: to choose between the
divisive — if illusory — partisan politics that characterized the Clinton and Bush eras, or a patriotic
appeal to “put the urgent needs of our nation above our own narrow interests” and do “what’s
good for the economy.”
At the core level, our most-enlightened leadership thinks we can all come together as Americans
to solve our economic problems, but there are tens of millions of people for whom being an
American no longer means much.
On one side are the countless ranks of the completely self-concerned, people who are patriotic
when it serves their interests or appeals to their transitory emotions; on the other side are people
who emotionally perceive themselves first as human beings and world citizens rather than
American citizens or consumers. The latter are a distinct minority, to be sure, but their numbers
are growing.
It is too late to “jump start” the largely mythological America we’ve known since World War II,
and it has been too late for well over a decade. It isn’t, however, too late for humanity, and that
is one way ahead for America.
In short, it’s not the economy, stupid; it is the fact that the American spirit died years ago, and
that’s just showing up in the political economy now. How can America regain its soul (or, to put
it in terms the typical conditioned American will understand, our economic vitality)?
Only when enough of its people, its leadership, and its Oligarchic Owners, place America deeply
in the context of humanity, and cease putting humanity in the context of America, will this
nation have a rebirth. Only when the purpose of this country is larger than the personal purposes
of Americans, and only when that the success of that purpose is expressed in terms of human
values (rather than market values), will we find the meaning and satisfaction in our personal
lives and in our civilization that all our comfort-junk, all our partisan ideology, all of our status-
seeking hypocrisies, have failed to bring us. Our civilization’s “vision-builder” has been high-
jacked by the contrived religion of economics masquerading not only as “science,” but as social
policy in a covert class war. Without a transformation in how we identify and express our
priorities, we can only continue trapped in the same dead-end paradigm.
New social technologies are being developed for identifying shared values and for crafting shared
visions and applying both with skillful means motivated by direct experience of human life on a
finite spherical planet. These technologies include the Model for Community Change used to
inform community-wide Social Enterprise Planning processes guided in connecting to reality by a
Metaphysics of Quality. The Model has begun in philanthropy and is working outward to embrace
a world without “externalities.” These technologies are fundamentally connected with human
values, and apply “quality-control” with metrics and feedback to maintain clear focus on the
benefit our society can provide us all.
A shared vision is not an idea.

It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power.

Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
Summary
Economics is nothing more than politics in disguise. It is the art of privatizing gains and socializing
losses. It is the State Religion of the United States (and much of the known world). Its god is lust
for power; its idol is growth. When personal and clan power becomes less important than quality
of life; when a critical mass of humanity wakes up and takes responsibility for its genuine needs
over its Pleistocene emotions and its socially conditioned wants; when the love of money and
power is no longer the root of evil; then we could have a green economy.
The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but
disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting
ourselves off from the source of sanity itself.
David Orr, environmental philosopher, in Adbusters, Sept/Oct 2002
There is an elaborate hierarchy of Oligarchs and their proxies who are the decision-makers on
social-resource allocation. Acting largely without malice but with a narrow vision, they have their
own set of motivations, algorithmically expressing their “inclusive fitness” for clear and ruthless
advantage. What counter-motivators are they even able to recognize and perhaps internalize, to
expand their own sustainability advantage to include larger and larger domains, perhaps even a
planetary one? As we enter deeper into this social conversation, we will become more and more
able to distinguish those counter-motivators. What conscious choices they are even able to make
is unclear.
The big picture is over seven billion people struggling to increase their social status by controlling
and using natural resources. All organizations within a country work to support the ruthless
genetic drive for more status by its leading members while suppressing dissenting opinions.
Because the “selfish genes” drive for status in the primate band and tribe has been so successful
in providing a survival advantage, it is enormously powerful, with people willing to go so far as to
kill themselves (e.g., hara-kiri) and family members (e.g., “honor” killings) to maintain and
advance their own status and that of their families and clans (their “us”). If people will even kill
their own children to preserve their social rank, they will certainly kill unrelated others. Besides
being one of the most powerful, the genetic drive for status can never be satisfied:
…I put for the generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of
power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1660, Chapter 11
All leading people within a social paradigm simply lie (mostly subconsciously) to further their drive
to increase status. In fact, they are leading because they lie so well. Moreover, no one is willing to
voluntarily lose social status (“lose face”) by explicitly or even implicitly admitting they were
fundamentally wrong all along. Subjectively, “Peak Capitalism” will be more disruptive to the
conditioned ideologues than Peak Oil, Peak Food, or Peak People, which, along with climate
change and other ecological consequences, will establish the operating parameters for any new
world order. All these “peaks” are not the causes of our situation; they are symptoms of a
civilization gone intrinsically astray as it has separated from its humanitarian values (as opposed
to our genetic “us versus them” power values expressed in “economies”).
As an example, we are more peaceful today than in, say, the Middle Ages, because we have more

energy and natural resources. In the future we will be less peaceful than we are today because
we’ll have less energy and resources. This is not rocket science. Civilization and human society are
a product of the energy supply. It dictates everything. All human history, since the first proto-
humans started a fire, has been about using more energy. All of humanity’s progress (including
decreasing violence) has resulted from access to more and more energy. Unless some surprising
new source appears, that’s going to reverse. History and natural laws tells us that systems that
experience rapid and massive growth see a proportionally rapid and massive collapse to actual
sustainability. With plunging energy supplies (and natural resources), it follows that peace will
also plunge.
We are genetically the same humans as those in the Middle Ages. They burned people alive at
stakes for being witches. They enrolled in fanatical ideological wars for resources and power for
their “leaders.” This behavior resulted from the social tensions around controlling a very small
(compared to today) and largely stagnant energy supply. When our energy supply heads
downward, such behaviors will become common once again.
When individuals and tribes are frustrated in their endless drive to increase “inclusive fitness,”
they resort to violence. The only familiar alternative to public violence is the sublimation of
endless conversion of natural resources into ever-more-marvelous status displays, and then into
garbage. But the laws of thermodynamics and the rampant consumption of the past few hundred
years show us that there are fewer natural resources available for conversion into these displays,
and far fewer on a per capita basis. The genetic drive for more-and-more colliding with
thermodynamic laws and physical limitations allowing less-and-less must lead to growing wars over
natural resources (eventually global in extent), unless there are some very powerful interventions
delivering compelling counter-motivators to Our Lords and Masters — such as withdrawal of a
critical mass of our consent and an erosion of denial of compelling natural limitations.
Anytime we can’t figure out how to find a win/win solution to a problem, it just means we
haven’t really learned the rules of the game we are playing.
Dr. Eliayhu Goldratt, Avraham Goldratt Institute
The required criteria for success in the 21st century are ecological integrity, effective
decision-making, and social cohesion. These are progressively replacing current
commitments to maximum economic growth, compulsive consumption, and international
competition.
Robert Theobald, Reworking Success
The active presence of open markets is a necessary but not sufficient condition for social equity.
Market values alone are not sufficient to assure social justice and ecological integrity. Only when
human and spiritual values have embraced our entire eco-system and effectively superceded
market values, while preserving the practical, operational wisdoms of the marketplace, can we
make the choices that will bring us closer to a sustainable future. This will require a deep and
inevitably disturbing re-examination and re-application of our shared values, motives, and
choices, as well as of our aspirations and behavior in the world. Only then can “what’s good for
the economy” also be good for the people whose human presence and productivity make it
possible. That will address the equity challenge; and then, when “what’s good for the economy”
is also good for the commons, we will have addressed the sustainability challenge.
In 1543 Copernicus announced to a startled Europe that the Earth was not stationary, but was
sailing rapidly through space as it spun around the Sun. This was difficult news to take in all at
once, but over time the Europeans reinvented their entire civilization in light of this strange
new fact about the Universe. The fundamental institutions of the medieval world, including
the monarchies, the church, the feudal economic system, and the medieval sense of self,

melted away as a radically different civilization was constructed.
We live in a similar moment of breakdown and creativity. The cosmological discovery that
shatters nearly everything upon which the modern age was built is the discovery that the
Universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and is so biased toward complexification
that life and intelligence are now seen to be a nearly inevitable construction of evolutionary
dynamics. Our new challenge is to reinvent our civilization. The major institutions of the
modern period, including that of agriculture and religion and education and economics, need
to be re-imagined within an intelligent, self-organizing, living Universe, so that instead of
degrading the Earth's life systems, humanity might learn to join the enveloping community of
living beings in a mutually enhancing manner. This great work will surely draw upon the
talents and energies of many millions of humans from every culture of our planet and
throughout the rest of the 21st century.
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Story of the Universe
Not around the creators of new noise doth the world revolve, but about the creators of new
values. Silently doth it revolve…
Friedrich Neitzche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1884

Resources
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html
http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild291207.htm
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/hubecon.htm
http://www.warsocialism.com/
http://www.warsocialism.com/SelfDeception.pdf
http://www.warsocialism.com/thermogenecollision.pdf
http://www.warsocialism.com/founded.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0208/S00055.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0901/S00135.htm?ref=patrick.net#a
http://www.solari.com/
http://www.solari.com/blog
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/24/eco-junk/
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1834
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness
http://www.augustreview.com/news_commentary/global_banking/the_twilight_of_irredeemable
_debt_2008050890/
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02132009/watch.html
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-flynt/common-sense-2009_b_264706.html
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/0105.html
http://www.australia.to/story/0,25197,23040467-060,00,00.html
http://www.newsweek.com/id/130637/output/print
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com (especially the primers in the right-hand column)

http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://www.theoildrum.com/
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~lionelorford/Peak%20Capitalism%20exec%20summary.pdf
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html
http://www.canada.com/Complexity+Theory/1286263/story.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090409/ap_on_bi_ge/lobbying_return_on_investment
Social Enterprise Planning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_enterprise
www.ecell.iitkgp.ernet.in/resource%20pages/SocialEnterprisePlanning.pdf
http://www.cognos.com/pdfs/whitepapers/wp_best_practice_planning.pdf
http://www.redf.org/learn-from-redf/tools/539
http://www.slideshare.net/xmergnc/social-enterprise-planning-guide/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Return_on_Investment
http://www.threelawsofperformance.com/
Steady-State Economy and Sustainability

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5464#more
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5559
The Investment Professional - Moving Toward a Steady-State Economy
Lauderdale Paradox
http://www.monthlyreview.org/091101foster-clark.php
Climate Change
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/24/could_australia_blow_apart_the_great_
global_warming_scare_97148.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/30/lindzen-on-negative-climate-feedback/
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/01/ross-mckitrick-
defects-in-key-climate-data-are-uncovered.aspx
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5389461/the-great-global-warming-scam-ctd.thtml
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/03/lawrence-solomon-
the-end-is-near.aspx
http://yelnick.typepad.com/politick/2009/06/co2-in-the-atmosphere-is-decreasing-how-will-the-
global-warming-crowd-explain-that.html
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6613938246449800148&hl=en#
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Monckton-Caught%20Green-
Handed%20Climategate%20Scandal.pdf
Significance of the “Hockey Stick”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxmo9DskYE
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-is-earth-worth.html
George Carlin
www.youtube.com/watch?v=#368519
Green Revolution
http://WW4Report.com/node/7980
Technocrats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
http://www.technocracy.org/
http://www.technocracy.ca/simp/begin.htm
48 Laws of Power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_48_Laws_of_Power
http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cg/Courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws_of_power.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=tmmOvqV4MboC&printsec=frontcover&dq=
%2248+Laws+of+Power
Oh, and one last thing: Gravity is matter’s urge to snuggle.

Quotations on the Theme…
Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas
flow.
John C. Polanyi
You just have to be able to drill in very hard wood… and keep on thinking beyond the point at
which thinking begins to hurt.
Werner Heisenberg
The ability to support a tension that can occasionally become almost unbearable is one of the
prime requisites for the very best sort of scientific research.
Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension
Newly acquired insights are at first only half understood by the one who begets them, and
appear as complete nonsense to all others... Any new idea which does not appear very strange
at the outset, does not have a chance of being a vital discovery.
Niels Bohr
Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered,
are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer,
appear foolish for not having discovered them before. ... Unfortunately, we find systems of
education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be
proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance ... [this puts] up an effective barrier against
any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds
imposed by one’s ignorance.
George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, Appendix 1
Evolutionary psychology is not just one more school of psychology. It is a perspective on the
whole of psychology that claims that we are human animals, and that our minds, no less than our
bodies, are products of the forces of nature operating on a time frame of millions of years;
human nature was forged from our ancestors’ struggle to survive and reproduce.
David Livingston Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the
Unconscious Mind
Scientists search for truth by forming statements that can be tested. If a statement cannot be
tested, then it is not “scientific.” Testable statements are known as “hypotheses” and take the
general form “If [I do this], then [this will occur].” For example, the hypothesis “If I drop a rock,
then it will fall to the ground” can be tested to see if it is “false.”
In 1934, Sir Karl Popper proposed a criterion of testability, or falsifiability, for scientific validity.
Scientific theories are hypotheses from which can be deduced statements testable by
observation; if the appropriate experimental observations falsify these statements, the
hypothesis is refuted. If a hypothesis survives efforts to falsify it, it may be tentatively
accepted. No scientific theory, however, can be conclusively established.
Popper’s mode of thought — the habit of attempting to prove oneself wrong — is the only path to
knowledge about the real world.

Consider first a phenomenon I call the deontic effect in human reasoning (Cummins, 1996b,
1996c). Deontic reasoning is reasoning about rights and obligations; that is, reasoning about
what one is permitted, obligated, or forbidden to do (Hilpinen, 1981; Manktelow & Over,
1991). Deontic reasoning contrasts with indicative reasoning, which is reasoning about what
is true or false. When reasoning about deontic rules (social norms), humans spontaneously
adopt a violation-detection strategy: They look for cheaters or rule-breakers. In contrast,
when reasoning about the truth status of statements about the world, they spontaneously
adopt a confirmation-seeking strategy. This effect is apparent in the reasoning of children
as young as three years of age (Cummins, 1996a; Harris & Nuñez, 1996) and has been
observed in literally hundreds of experiments on adult reasoning over the course of nearly
thirty years, making it one of the most reliable effects in the psychological literature (see
Cummins, 1996b, 1996c, and Oaksford & Chapter, 1996 for reviews of this literature).
Denise D. Cummins & Colin Allen (Editors), The Evolution of Mind,

Oxford, 1998, pages 39, 40
Evolutionary psychologists have found that humans evolved to naturally use a “falsification
strategy” with respect to the social world, but use a “confirmation strategy” with respect to the
physical world. Our innate social-world “falsification strategy” causes us to instinctively reject
social anomalies and attempt to “falsify” claims about the real world that might jeopardize
social beliefs (e.g., the claim that global oil production will “peak” soon).
On the other hand, our innate physical-world “confirmation strategy” allows us to defend social
constructions of reality (e.g., the “free market”) to the death, even if the ideals they represent
are far from physical reality.
Jay Hanson
Ends are ape-chosen; only means are man’s.
Aldous Huxley
...underlying all the other reasons for warfare is almost always this fundamental imbalance of
resource stress and population growth.
Steven LeBlanc, Constant Battles, page 169
The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a
fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to
people but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic.
E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, 1992, pages 328-329
To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of
the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the
ocean. Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues
out. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the
New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds
of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of
game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a
new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.
Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness,
Viking Press, 1980
Great scenes inspire great Ideas. The natural mightiness of America expands the Mind, and it

partakes of the greatness it contemplates.
Thomas Paine, letter to Sir Joseph Banks, 1789
Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans attempt to cast it in
terms of technological or economic progress: eco-villages, sustainable development, energy
efficiency and so on. Under the circumstances, such compulsive techno-optimism seems
maladaptive. ... Why do people seem incapable of doing the simplest things without making
them into projects, preferably ones that involve some element of new technology?
Dimitry Orlov, Our Village
...[R]emember that this out-of-control global financial system is a man-made artifact, a political
regime devised over many years by interested parties to serve their ends. Nothing in nature or,
for that matter, in economics, requires the rest of us to accept a system that is so unjust and
mindlessly destructive.
William Greider, in The Nation
Economic students are programmed (using modern “doublethink” techniques) to believe that
there are no “limits to growth.”
Plenty of Gloom, The Economist, Editorial, 20 December 1997
Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear
our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who
break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in
chaotic sprawl. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children,
the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our
poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of
our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our
learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in
short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America
except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Robert F. Kennedy, 18 March 1968
We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of
treasure and blood. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near
future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my
country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in
high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by
working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the
Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever
before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.
Abraham Lincoln, in a letter of 21 November 1864 to Colonel William F. Elkins
[With the development of modern physics] it became possible to see orthodox economic theory
for what it really was: a bowdlerized imitation of nineteenth-century physics… It was not the
methods of science that were appropriated by the early neoclassicals as it was the appearances
of science, for the early neoclassicals possessed a singularly inept understanding of the physics
they so admired… [Neoclassical economists attempt] to reduce all social institutions such as
money, property rights, and the market itself to epiphenomena of individual constrained
optimization calculation. All these attempts have failed, despite their supposed dependence
upon mathematical rigor, because they always inadvertently assume what they aim to

deduce… Conservation principles are the key to the understanding of a mathematical
formulation of any phenomenon, and it has been there that the neoclassicals have been woefully
negligent.
Philip Mirowski, Against Mechanism: Protecting Economics from Science,

Rowman and Littlefield, 1988, pages 5-6
The mind is a squadron of simpletons. It is not unified, it is not rational, it is not well designed —
or designed at all. It just happened, an accumulation of innovations of the organisms that lived
before us. The mind evolved, through countless animals and through countless worlds.
Like the rest of biological evolution, the human mind is a collage of adaptations (the propensity
to do the right thing) to different situations. Our thought is a pack of fixed routines —
simpletons. We need them. It is vital to find the right food at the right time, to mate well, to
generate children, to avoid marauders, to respond to emergency quickly. Mental routines to do
so have evolved over millions of years and developed in different periods in our evolution, as
Rumi noted.
We don't think of ourselves as of such humble origins. The triumphs that have occurred in the
short time since the Industrial Revolution have completely distorted our view of ourselves.
Hence, the celebrated triumph of humanity is its rationality: the ability to reason through events
and act logically, to organize business. To plan for the future, to create science and technology.
One influential philosopher, Daniel Dennet, wrote recently: “When a person falls short of perfect
rationality...there is no coherent...description of the person’s mental states.”
Yet to characterize the mind as primarily rational is an injustice; it sells us short, it makes us
misunderstand ourselves, it has perverted our understanding of our intelligence, our schooling,
our physical and mental health. Holding up rationality, and its remorseless deliberation, as the
model of the mind has, more important, set us along the wrong road to our future. Instead of
the pinnacle, rationality is just one small ability in a compound of possibilities.
The mind evolved great breadth, but it is shallow, for it performs quick and dirty sketches of the
world. This rough-and-ready perception of reality enabled our ancestors to survive better. The
mind did not evolve to know the world or to know ourselves. Simply speaking, there has never
been, nor will there ever be, enough time to be truly rational.
Rationality is one component of the mind, but it is used rarely, and in a very limited area.
Rationality is impossible anyway. There isn't time for the mind to go through the luxurious
exercises of examining alternatives. Consider the standard way of examining evidence, the truth
table, a checklist of information about whether propositions are correct or not. To know
whether Aristotle is a hamburger, you would look up “Aristotle” or “hamburger” in this table.
Now think of the number of issues you immediately know well — what Yugoslavia is, whether
skateboards are used at formal dinners, how chicken sandwiches should taste, what your spouse
wore this morning — and you will see that your own truth table, if entered randomly, would have
millions of entries just waiting! [pages 2-3]
A mind built up with countless specific adaptations can never be rational. We piece together the
results of a small set of probes to judge the world, picking up a few signals and making quick
assessments of what is outside, in the case of marauders, and inside, in the case of memories
and dreams. Such a mind will never be rational; but it will always try to adapt. And it cannot
always be correct either. If we consider a mind that has evolved to meet most situations
adequately, say 95 percent of them, we may have a better idea of what being correct is. [page
221]

Since the mind evolved to select a few signals and then dream up a semblance, whatever enters
our consciousness is overemphasized. It does not matter how the information enters, whether
via a television program, a newspaper story, a friend’s conversation, a strong emotional
reaction, a memory — all is overemphasized. We ignore other, more compelling evidence,
overemphasizing and overgeneralizing from the information close at hand to produce a rough-
and-ready realty. [page 258]
The [mental] system we recruited had the primary aim of reacting quickly to immediate danger
— those who did lived long enough to produce us. Those who acted more thoughtfully and with
due deliberation of the proper course, who could avoid panic when confronted by mild threats —
who acted rationally, that is — probably lived shorter, and thus less generative, lives. The
survival argument against rationality in primeval conditions is that payoff is very lopsided: Fail to
respond to a real danger, even if that danger would kill you only 1/10,000 as often, and you will
be dead. A few years later, you will be deader in evolutionary terms, for fewer of your genes
will be around. However, an overreaction to danger produces only a little hysteria, a little
stress, and maybe a little embarrassment — probably little or no loss of reproductive ability.
Maybe the excitement would even recruit a little more reproductive effort!
Running from every snake or tiger or loud noise probably doesn’t disrupt life too much. Not
running, while it might kill you only slightly more often, can eventually produce major changes
in the population. The same numbers hold in this example as for the height difference cited
earlier. If panic in response to a threat in all cases improved survival by even 1/10,000, those
who panicked would be 484 million times more populous than those who did not. And so it was
good to respond emotionally and quickly to the average dangers threatening most of our
ancestors. Rationality is a great idea and ideal, but we never had the time for it; we don’t have
time for it now, and thus we don’t have the mind for it. [page 262]
Robert Ornstein, The Evolution of Consciousness, Prentice Hall, 1991, ISBN 0-13-
587569-2
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be
led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
I’m an old man and I’ve had lots of problems, most of which never happened.
Mark Twain
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
Japanese Proverb
The Visionary is the only true realist.
Frederico Fellini
It is not information or knowledge, but vision, that equals power.
Dominique Goupil, President, FileMaker, Inc.
If we are to have vision, we must learn to participate in the object of the vision.
The apprenticeship is hard.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French Aeronaut and Writer

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.
James Broughton
Hypotheses and other forms of theory are not to be confused with the dominant paradigm within
which the theories and hypotheses were constructed and tested. A paradigm is a perceptual model
or operational system that is acquired by the brain all of a piece, which reorganizes all previous
experience and knowledge in a way more satisfying (and often more elegant) than a previous
operating system. It is usually acquired by the working through of exemplars that use the new
paradigm. It is not, however, acquired by the brain by conscious decision or argument but rather
by the workings of the brain which are not even accessed by the conscious mind. It is acquired and
it immediately changes the whole perceptual universe — all conscious thought afterward is
transformed by it and it usually is such a transcendent experience that people may go days or
even weeks on little sleep and food, while they totally throw themselves into all the implications
of the new paradigm.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition, 1969
You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.
Thomas Kuhn (seconding Julian Jaynes)
Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. …the past clarifies
potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and
lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine
collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of
population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for — a voluntary
change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall
consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if
severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and
consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology.
Joseph A. Tainter, Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies, from

Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, 1996; at
http://www.dieoff.org/page134.htm
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776, page 1
I often think about why and how this culture values permanence. So often we hear this culture
described as a throw-away culture and that’s certainly true. But there’s a larger sense in which
permanence is valued above all else. People want to make a mark. They want to build some
monument that will last. They want to stop decay. They want to cheat death. It’s all based on
that disrespect for nature you’ve written about and worse, a fear and hatred of nature and of
death. ... Even in conversations about “green” products, permanence is valued. ... I should
prefer structures that will be eaten by termites and fungi (and lived in by birds and mice along
the way), and valuing that permanence interferes with my attempts to live sustainably. I think
part of the problem is that civilization constantly tries to turn circles into straight lines.
Ultimately, the circles close, but it can take a long time.
Derrick Jensen, quoting Terry Shistar in What We Leave Behind, 2009
As for pointing to our mental failures with scorn or dismay, we might as well profess disappoint-
ment with the mechanics of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the degree
of disillusionment we feel in response to any particular human behavior is the precise measure of

our ignorance of its evolutionary and genetic origins.
Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene
James Tobin, the American Nobel Prize winner in economics, has questioned very seriously
whether it makes sense from the point of view of American society as a whole to divert so much
of its young talent from the top universities into financial markets. This debate is not new. John
Maynard Keynes considered the same question in the 1930s, and expressed the view that on the
whole the rewards of those in the financial sector were justified. Many individuals attracted to
these markets, Keynes argued, are of a domineering and even psychopathic nature. If their
energies could not find an outlet in money making, they might turn instead to careers involving
open and wanton cruelty. Far better to have them absorbed on Wall Street or in the City of
London than in organised crime.
Paul Ormerod, The Death of Economics, John Wiley, 1997, pages 3-7
...a society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a
collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.
David Ehrenfeld
It was futile to work for to work for political solutions to humanity’s problems because
humanity’s problems were not political. Political problems did exist, all right, but they were
entirely secondary. The primary problems were philosophical, and until the philosophical
problems were solved, the political problems would have to be solved over and over again. The
phrase “vicious circle” was coined to describe the ephemeral effectiveness of almost all political
activity.
For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that
one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of
rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. For the unconscionable, political
reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one’s holdings and legitimize one’s
greed. Both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.
The monkey wrench in the progressive machinery of primate evolution was the propensity of the
primate band to take its political leaders — its dominant males — too seriously. Of benefit to the
band when it was actively threatened by predators, the dominant male (or political boss) was
almost wholly self-serving and was naturally dedicated not to liberation but to control. Behind
his chest-banging and fang display, he was largely a joke and could be kept in his place (his
place being that of a necessary evil) by disrespect and laughter. …
Of course, as long as there were willing followers, there would be exploitive leaders. And there
would be willing followers until humanity reached that philosophical plateau where it recognized
that its great mission in life had nothing to do with any struggle between classes, races, nations,
or ideologies, but was, rather, a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light
up the brain. On that quest, politics was simply a roadblock of stentorian baboons.
Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990
When confronted with ever-declining resources, the preservation of social order requires more-
and-more cooperation, but individuals are genetically programmed to reduce cooperation and
seek advantage. This genetic legacy sets up a positive feedback loop: declining common
resources cause individuals to reduce cooperation even more, which reduces common resources
even faster, which leads to collapse even faster.

Jay Hanson, http://www.warsocialism.com/thermogenecollision.pdf
War analyst Stanislav Andreski concluded that the trigger for most wars is hunger, or even “a
mere drop from the customary standard of living.” Anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember spent
six years studying war in the late 1980s among 186 preindustrial societies. They focused on
precontact times in hopes of collecting the ‘cleanest, least distorted’ data. Andreski, it seems,
was right. War’s most common cause, the Embers found, was fear of deprivation. The victors in
the wars they studied almost always took territory, food, and/or other critical resources from
their enemies. Moreover, unpredictable disasters-droughts, blights, floods, and freezes — which
led to severe hardships, spurred more wars than did chronic shortages.
This also holds true among modern nations. In 1993, political scientists Thomas E Homer-Dixon,
Jeffrey H. Boutwell, and George W. Rathjens examined the roots of recent global conflicts and
concluded, “There are significant causal links between scarcities of renewable resources and
violence.”
In short, many wars seem to be a mass, communal robbery of another social group’s life-support
resources.
Michael P. Ghiglieri, THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence,
1999 (page 190)
The dynamic characteristics of complex social systems frequently mislead people. … [Urban
policies for example] are being followed on the presumption that they will alleviate the
difficulties. … In fact, a downward spiral develops in which the presumed solution makes the
difficulty worse and thereby causes redoubling of the presumed solution so that matters become
still worse.
The same downward spiral frequently develops in national government and at the level of world
affairs. Judgment and debate lead to programs that appear to be sound. Commitment increases
to the apparent solutions. If the presumed solutions actually make matters worse, the process by
which this happens is not evident. So, when the troubles increase, the efforts are intensified
that are actually worsening the problems.
Jay W. Forrester, _______________ , 1973, p. 93-94
The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a
complex system. The political system is simple. It operates with limited information (rational
ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in
contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system
tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.
Andrew Gelman

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Part 2: “What could and should be” and how to get there…
The problem before us: The goal of increased consumption (“growth”) for a “strong economy” is
in direct opposition to the goal of decreased consumption for reaching ecological balance
(between our species and its environment) and sustainability of the human enterprise. If we
don’t revisit our values, and align our behavior with more carefully chosen values, and choose to
reduce consumption while we have some chance to do it gradually, nature will reduce it for us,
abruptly and ruthlessly. True overall-system sustainability is inevitable.
A means approach to a solution to that problem: What is the social structure or arrangement
that requires minimum work and energy? What is the social structure or arrangement that
requires minimum natural and human resources? What is the social structure or arrangement
that exists in harmony with all the other life on the planet and with the planet itself (the “Web
of Life”)? What is the social structure or arrangement that displays collective responsibility and
rationality, while recognizing and sufficiently accommodating individual irresponsibility and
irrationality, whatever its origination (as the structure erodes its power and evolves it)? What is
the social structure or arrangement that defuses the n-Prisoners’ Dilemma (also known as the
Tragedy of the Commons)?
In short, what is the social structure that is sustainable? What values will be applied in that
society to guide the transition and accomplish sustainability? How will they be applied?
There is a lot of vague talk these days about a return to more human-oriented values; however,
in that conversation there is little or no grounded methodology, and no practicable means to
accomplish that. That is the solution offered here.
There’s also a lot of talk about a “techno-fix,” referring to information, material, and energy
technologies that could solve our operational problems. Without a doubt, that kind of fix will
make a significant contribution. However, all that advantage is for naught without social
evolutions to solve the fundamental physical problems and address the core predicament of
humanity — the application of social technologies to provide structure and guidance for values-
driven evolution of cultural choices. Those are the technologies offered here, to add dimensions
of liberation and sanity when combined with the established and otherwise controlling and
suppressing technologies of propaganda, socialization, education, and psychological and social
conditioning. Expansive breadth can erode narrowness and implosion; this system is self-
rewarding with positive feedback loops. What’s in it for us? Let’s find out…
De-Condition Ourselves from Four Paradigms

Myths of Humanity
Is there an innate “human nature,” and if so, what is it?
Nature versus nurture (a sophistry — nurture is part of nature)
Tabula rasa versus algorithmic “firmware”
“Selfish genes” and neurotransmitter addiction
Evolution at play…
Myths of Governance (including Myths of Money)

Is there an innate social organization, and if so, what is it?
Unconscious primate-band power dynamics versus “chosen” rules for society
Realpolitic versus ideology
History versus mythology
Corporations (and “corporate personhood”), fascism, and feudalism

Common interests versus special interests
Myths of Science
Is there an innate way of experiencing, figuring-out, evaluating, and engaging reality,
and if so, what is it?
Positivism versus science
Modern science versus ideology and politics: religiosity
Philosophy and science
Myths of Energy
What is the true energy budget of humanity?
How much energy does each of us really use?
Bring science and engineering into the otherwise entirely political conversation.
Dispel cultural inertia from 150 years of “unlimited” energy
Where does most of that energy come from, how much is available to accomplish work
(“exergy”), and who controls it?
Energy sources versus distribution infrastructure
Energy, politics, and war
Relationships between work, energy, matter, wealth, and money
Net energy and Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI)
Systems Politics versus Process Politics

A feeling arose by the seventeenth century that moralizing and preaching religious doctrine
could no longer be trusted to restrain the destructive and “irrational passion”" of men. A new
means of restraint and regulation had to be found.
Rational Interests
Bernard Mandeville (1670?-1733) laid the political foundation for what would be called
Libertarianism when he suggested that a society based on “rational interests” (like a bee hive)
would suppress irrational passions. Mandeville’s ideal society was one where the unwitting
cooperation of individuals, each working for his or her own interest would result in the greatest
benefit to society at large.
This was to be done through the mechanism of the “invisible hand,” a mechanism “identified”
by John Stuart Mill as a hypothesis to explain the patterns he saw, much as gravity was
hypothesized by Isaac Newton to explain the planetary (and other) motions he saw. The
“invisible hand” is a “meme” or “metaphor” that is useful to organize thinking and action
around a shared vision.
Powerless Government
The French writer Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), further developed Libertarian politics with
a notion of division of political powers in government. The division of power would, in effect,
neutralize government and prevent citizens from gaining power over each other; conversely,
citizens could easily make power powerless by changing parties. This is what Montesquieu called
“liberty.” Today, we call Montesquieu’s philosophy “Social Darwinism,” a term which is most
closely associated with the writings of Herbert Spencer. It was Spencer who coined the phrase
“survival of the fittest” — a phrase that describes Montesquieu’s state of “liberty” perfectly.
The development and application of Montesquieu’s ideas prefigured Modernism, with its
separation of religious, political, and scientific values and practices, and in parallel with

Modernism came the separation of powers in society.
Whence the multi-cameral, multi-branch republic (which, as we have discovered, has corrupting
cross-talk between the various camera and branches).
The effectiveness of the principle of “division of power,” from isolation from other tracks of
each track’s decision-makers throughout the parallel-tracking and expression (application) of
powers, while apparently successful for a while, has been dispelled by spontaneous human-
nature cross-influencing (“reciprocal altruism”), by advances in transportation and
communications technology, and by increases in complexity, all factors that the structural
separations native to the Eighteenth Century have been unable to withstand to prevent
corruption of the basic vision of society.
Fundamental (but Convenient) Errors

Prevailing beliefs derived from the practice of unrealistic and corrupted “process politics” assert
that Homo sapiens (and life in general) is a fitness pursuer (which in econo-speak means
“rational utility maximizer”). However, in actual practice Homo is an adaptation executer.
[SIDEBAR: By “rational” we don’t mean the facile after-the-fact “reasonableness” (which

includes the “prove it” mentality of the pseudo-scientific) of the adaptation-routine executer,
who is sometimes “unconsciously” very clever in synthesizing new combinations of standard
algorithms. We mean the oblivious “rationalist” psychopathology of the damaged being that is
teleological — goal-fixated — in its “moral” justification through rationality. The “heartless
libertarian” as opposed to the “compassionate conservative;” both are illusory identity-myths.]
When learning does happen, it happens primarily in service of adaptation-execution (“new

execute-logic” that can be very synthesizing of “standard” algorithms, and thereby innovative in
an immediate sense), and only with great difficulty in service of pursuing longer-term fitness
(the “teleological” approach), even in response to changing circumstances.
In individuals in response to changing circumstances, the inertia (“habits”) of executing standard

permutations of adaptation-algorithms tends to over-ride any tentative new improvised
modified-algorithm-syntheses from consciously pursuing fitness.
In the collective (the “mob”) in response to changing circumstances, the established adaptation-
algorithms and the behaviors they determine do not change except under the influence of
adapting individuals of high status and immediate power, or when a common threat is so obvious
and immediate that different action becomes unanimous.
In all cases, the patter and the chatter (the “soundtrack”) happen almost entirely independent
of the actual behaviors (the “action”): individuals and the mob can rationalize any behavior
(which rationalizations are almost always after-the-fact, and almost always based on
externalized and objectified abstractions — “reifications”).
The Nazis and the Communists had their “special” theories of biology; the “special” biology that
Capitalists invented is the standard economic model of Homo oeconomicus, which is
characterized by the following assumptions:
1. Action is centered in the individual (methodological individualism). Everything that

happens in institutions and society can be traced back to the actions of individuals.
2. A strict distinction is to be drawn between preferences (i.e., values which form the basis
of motivation) and restrictions (i.e. external stimuli and constraints on the scope for action).

3. An individual’s preferences are given and inalterable. The individual’s actions are
determined entirely by restrictions.
4. Only self-interested, not pro-social, preferences are assumed to exist. The preferences of
other people do not concur with one’s own preferences.
5. The cognitive perception of restrictions is identical in all individuals.
6. Individuals behave entirely rationally. They are able to determine their own maximum
utility according to their own preferences within given restrictions.
The assumptions in economics are of absolute importance because that’s what public policy
decisions are based on (and not on the results of the few inconclusive economics
“experiments”). If a realistic model were used for the human brain, mind, and behaviors, it
would nullify all arguments for “free markets” and “democracy.” A new scientific model of
the human brain and mind would have far-reaching political implications.
Modern Neoclassical Economics is founded on “logical positivism.” It seeks “confirmation” of

expectations rather than “falsification” of hypotheses. That’s why no one except professors
and economics students cares about their compromised experiments involving “rational
calculation.”
It is on the basis of these assumptions that the standard economic model is applied to all
spheres of life, for instance, to the family, drug abuse, abortion, criminality, art, sport,
religion, suicide, you name it. This is tied to the withdrawal (or, more accurately, the
ejection) of psychology from economics. Neoclassical standard economics has thus developed
an imperialistic understanding of itself as the “queen of the social sciences,” a view which
has provoked significant aggression and criticism among its social-science peers. Criticism of
standard economics refers chiefly to these assumptions about people, and to assumptions
about the “market.” Particularly pernicious is the combination of the assumptions regarding
the cognitive and motivational characteristics of Homo oeconomicus and the assumptions
regarding the transferability of the economic model from anonymous market relationships to
the relationships within organizations and between individuals.
The criticism of the assumptions about the cognitive characteristics of Homo oeconomicus is
the least controversial. It has led to the idea of bounded rationality as a consequence of
people’s limited capacity to process information. Individuals do not maximise their utility,
but can at best achieve satisfactory results. It is on this basis that the institutional economic
approaches have been developed. However, the idea of bounded rationality remains vague in
institutional economics. The research of psychological economics into decision anomalies,
developed over twenty years, has not been considered. Instead, the same assumptions are
still in place as the cornerstones of economic analysis, even though the research on decision
anomalies provides precise and situation-specific differentiations of bounded rationality.
Economics is correctly seen as a core aspect of the sophisticated and elaborate

disinformation campaign (shown in Adam Curtis’ films) that has been run by Our Lords and
Masters against the middle classes and poor for at least the last 100 years, and probably
much longer in more-primitive forms. As far as I know, no economist has written a book
based on realistic evolutionary biology. The “Ecological Economists” explicitly rejected
Darwinism while they were organizing. Needless to say, without a realistic model of human
nature, they haven’t come up with realistic public policy. As far as I know, the only political
people who have incorporated Darwin into public policy (and even then, only gingerly) are
Albert Somit and Steven Peterson in Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy and Human

Nature and Public Policy: an Evolutionary Approach. As far as I know, the only philosopher
who has systematically adopted Darwinism is John Gray in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans
and Other Animals and other works.
Since people are unaware of the real determinants of their behavior, and believe myths and
illusions such as those from the Standard Social Sciences Model of the 1960s and the Cult of the
Individual (which are earlier rationalizations), among other ideologies, they pretend that they
are acting on the basis of those after-the-fact calculations and rationalizations.
Behavior can be changed by changing the conditions of which it is a function.
B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
They give priority to their internally-consistent rationalizations — especially shared

rationalizations — over any objective evidence of failure or success of their behavior, individual
and, especially, collective. They do not learn. They make their interpretations into comforting
ideology (“consensus delusion”), seek alignment from their peers, and maintain and gain social
status.
No traditional myth is as untruthful as the modern myth of progress. All prevailing

philosophies embody the fiction that human life can be altered at will. Better aim for the
impossible, they say, than submit to fate. Invariably the result is a cult of human self-
assertion that soon ends in farce.
John Gray, Gray's Anatomy, Introduction
Unless one is trained as an engineer or scientist, one will not try to falsify one’s own
rationalizations and political agenda (i.e., “test” it against some “objective reality”). Potential
status-gains almost always over-ride practical and ethical considerations, and certainly
immediate personal gains over-ride amorphous and future collective gains.
In the best case (scientists and engineers trained in critical thinking and nominally without prior
agendas), it takes at least three years of hard work to re-program/de-condition/learn a new
paradigm (if it ever happens at all). Human nature itself and socializing education have made a
widespread voluntary “power down” of our civilization’s excesses literally impossible.
Such a shift would include the re-balancing of Dopamine (and other neurotransmitter) rewards in
the Limbic System to come from collective “us” success instead of from status-seeking personal
or clan success — a social and cultural re-balancing of motivators and rewards. The best way to
obtain that is through natural consequences. Natural consequences are non-arbitrary, non-
special-interest, and arise organically out of a flow or pattern or dynamically evolving situation.
Ceasing operations and liquidation upon bankruptcy when one cannot meet one’s obligations and
no-one will accept one’s notes is one such natural consequence. Receiving huge salaries,
bonuses, and job security for excess causing such a consequence is not.
Rich people owe their “status” (one of the most-powerful social drives) to “business as usual”
(BAU). They will do everything in their power to prevent an intelligent “power down” if that
means losing their social status.
They hire the lobbyists to write the legislation to be enacted by elected pawns who will insure
their personal status is secure. Given the opportunity, any of us would do the same, expressing
our impulses exactly as they have evolved.
The Mandeville-Montesquieu-Quesnay-DuPont-Jefferson-Franklin-Madison ideal of government-

by-economic-growth was brilliant when it was conceived 250 years ago. These men invented a

social and moral system — complete with justifying abstractions — that will now protect itself
from fundamental change until it collapses from its own internal contradictions. It has a
“cultural immune system” to defend itself from change. Economics didn’t start out as pure
disinformation — the Physiocrats were trying to figure out how we create wealth. Nowadays,
with the understanding of energy laws on a finite planet, we know that the only way to obtain
wealth is to take it from someone else — from one’s own serfs or someone else’s — increasingly
through perpetual debt bondage that is cheaper to obtain and maintain than through
military conquest or explicit political subjugation. A sane world wouldn’t need “economics,”
and an honorable one wouldn’t need the kind of politics that fronts for the Oligarchs.
Contemporary capitalism, the conversion of nature into garbage for money and power, will
shortly reach its logical conclusion: a century of wars picking over what’s left, indeterminate
1984-style wars fought as false-flag operations just like the Punic Wars of old, by increasingly
totalitarian governments fronting for ever-more-obscure Oligarchs in a system of increasingly
unstable complexity. Peak Capitalism represents the tragedy of the commons in a very large
setting — the planet itself.
Consider two basic types of political systems: “process” politics and “systems”
politics:
As the name implies, process politics emphasizes the adequacy and fairness of the rules
governing the process of politics. If the process is fair, then, as in a trial conducted according
to due process, the outcome is assumed to be just — or at least the best the system can
achieve. By contrast, systems politics is concerned primarily with desired outcomes; means
are subordinated to predetermined ends.
Ophuls & Boyan, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited, 1992, page 24
[William Ophuls is a former United States Foreign Service Officer. First published in
1977, this volume received widespread critical and popular acclaim, winning the
Gladys M. Kammerer Award as the year’s best book on public policy, and a similar
prize from the International Studies Association.]
Examples:
“AMERICA” (Madison, principle-based, process politics)
Suppose ten “rational utility maximizing” men were in a lifeboat with just enough water to
keep them alive for ten days. Further, suppose that all ten men were required to row on a
direct course to make land in ten days.
These men are completely rational and understand (“calculate”) that they must restrict their
own water rations if they are to survive. All ten men self-restrict their own rations,
spontaneously row in shifts, and survive.
This is simply not credible… [It is a small example of the n-Prisoners’ Dilemma]
DICTATOR (Captain Bligh, pragmatic, systems politics)
Suppose nine men and Captain Bligh were in a lifeboat with just enough water to keep them
alive for ten days. Further, suppose that all nine men were required to row in a direct course
order to make land in ten days.

Bligh knows that these men are not “rational utility maximizers,” and sits on the water
barrel with cocked pistols to protect the water. Bligh restricts everyone’s rations, organizes
and enforces the rowing, and they all survive.
This actually happened…
Because the internal contradictions of its process have finally and fatally undermined it, the
time has come to replace our current system of “process” politics with a new “systems”
politics with a new system that develops, applies, and maintains the integrity of an improved
process, one with compensations for the weaknesses of the old one. The new system must be
administered by the most-qualified entities, with strict separation of powers, functions, and
persons, and without abandoning the potential process integrity of process politics. In fact,
more systems integrity may contribute significantly to more process integrity.
The authoritarian excesses of experimental “systems politics” polities (all of which have
failed) must be avoided:
Ruthlessness (of the Mob) [versus ruthlessness of the Alpha Oligarchs]

Personal-power-cult values overriding human and social values
Oligarchic Alpha-clan arrogance
A pernicious “Cult of Mediocrity” hiding behind a leadership “Cult of Personality”
Hijacking by special interests, with
Obsessive secrecy
Arbitrariness and cronyism
Covert manipulations
Fear-mongering
Concentration of wealth and power
Ideology and abstraction replacing engagement with reality
(This is also common in process polities)
Outline of a “systems polity” branch-structure:
• Motivation and justification through religious and secular philosophy

• Regulation through science
• Enforcement through the State
or, more elaborately
• Religious and secular philosophy and values applied by a “wisdom” cadre, to define
operative shared values, vision, and mission(s),
• Science to objectively and pragmatically set explicit and specific operational
priorities and means (and recognize limiting parameters) to accomplish that vision
through those missions,
• Government to implement those means for those missions and accepting and working
with those parameters (to “execute” them: the original meaning of the “Executive
Branch”)
What are the practical requirements and consequences of this? Forget about “rights” and
“ideologies” and normative “shoulds.” For instance, the rather shallow conventional wisdom is
that scientists shouldn’t make policy, and for good reasons. From practical experience, we have
learned the hard way that politicians shouldn’t make policy either (and for even better reasons),
turning that conventional wisdom on its head. With this systems-polity approach, neither

scientists nor politicians would set policy (that would be done by the values-applying vision-
setters). Scientists would, however, define the operational parameters and goals for
implementing that policy, and the politicians would execute or implement those goals, with
feedback loops to all three branches.
It would be sensible to have operational input concerning biophysical systems from scientists and
engineers and some process to ensure that outliers with paradigm-overturning ideas were not
frozen out.
But that input would be to values-applying decision-makers such as poets, novelists,

philosophers, magicians, senior primary school teachers, craft-workers (cabinet makers,
blacksmiths, weavers) and acknowledged wise elders (preferably ones who understand science
and the scientific method). We would get far better results than from policy and objectives
decisions made only by scientists and engineers and politicians paying only lip service to religious
and philosophical values.
In a systems polity the system itself is autocratic rather than politicians or leaders being
autocratic. Its leadership is principle-based, with the principles and those who apply them held
to the highest standards. This autocracy is committed to optimizing individuality in balance with
collective requirements, in a culture of liberation rather than subjugation (to the tyranny of the
majority under the “leadership” of the Oligarchs). This is contrast to the totalitarian culture of
the Han Chinese tribe (which has its own set of Oligarchs) and, only apparently at the other end
of the spectrum, the illusory “freedom” culture of the American “nation.” The system polity
would maintain a compartmented rule of law that is relatively incorruptible, since its most-
corruptible components are only making tactical and technical decisions about implementation
rather than principled and strategic decisions about larger issues.
In a slightly different mode, redefine “freedom” to be about “freedom to… whatever

(accomplishment)” instead of “freedom from… whatever (boogeymen).” “Freedom from…” is the
disempowering and paralyzing corruption that arises from fear manipulations, and from
irresponsible “entitlement consciousness.” “Freedom to…” is the perfect libertarian model, and
the fundament of the original American system based on English Common Law.
[Jefferson quotation on doing no harm…].
Generate social-status and neuro-transmitter rewards to re-balance pursuit of “Freedom to…”

over “Freedom from…”.
Thinking almost exclusively in abstractions is one major problem with our present polity.
Without some fairly constant reality-check through a working Model, those abstractions become
simple, ideological, and self-serving, even narcissistic. No complexity in one’s internal mental
models leads to no ability to experience and manage complexity outside. If the internal
model is inadequate to structure the experience of “reality,” then the choice devolves to stick
with what we appear to have mastery of and presents no apparent risk: our habits around
socially acceptable shared abstractions. In other words, religion and its surrogates, such as
political ideology and “social science” (including economics). This gives us inclusive fitness and
maintains a stable position within the system (until the system itself collapses from internal
instabilities and lack of adaptability to external changes).
I discern a disturbing historical pattern — the crack and fall of civilizations owing to a morbid
intensification of their own first principles. [Paraphrased]
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), The Philosophy of History

How (by what means) can we re-structure the fundamental organizing
conversation of America?
Apply Social Enterprise Planning (SEP) using the Model for Community Change (MfCC) to
provide a constructive working platform for expression
Social Enterprising Planning is a values-rich (i.e., more than market values) and feedback-
rich process for organizational and community planning and implementation of means
(strategies, tactics, and activities) to integrate and realize both social-value and market
value missions in the context of its larger environment. It starts with shared values and ends
with evidence of delivered value (in terms of those values). In a sustainable polity, all
organizations (especially corporations or whatever kind of entity succeeds them) must
become explicit social enterprises, and all must participate in a real-time and transparent
community conversation committed to an appropriate human or commons outcome. Instead
of a “business plan,” “corporate” entities would have a “Social Enterprise Plan” showing how
they would return social and environmental benefit in exchange for their government-
granted license to profit.
The Model for Community Change is a mental and visual framework (or, more simply, a
template) to structure a community’s conversation around its explicitly stated values, align
around shared visions, and enroll in, and commit to, active missions to make real those
visions. The model then guides the community’s attention and structures the community’s
actions so there is some individual and collective learning happening as it acts, and then uses
the evidence from that learning to advance the community’s collective conversation and its
success at realizing its vision. It provides the perfect structure for an ongoing Social
Enterprise Planning process. It’s an iterative process that can progress through time, with
structures that tend to reflect human experience and reality instead of ideology or wishful
thinking. The Model (or something very like it) would be essential for coherence and for
diluting and eroding the advantages even of desperado special-interest sociopaths, large and
small. The Model relies on direct experience in the community and is empirically knowledge-
centric, an advance beyond the pseudo-science of the “social sciences:” it does not rely on
“data” to obtain that knowledge; it gathers data for evidence to strengthen its value
proposition. It is not an hypothesis of change; it is actually a model that describes the
functional flow of change we already know is happening, how we have observed it to occur,
and where we want it to lead. We know that from our direct shared experience, continuously
and transparently calibrated against our values, vision, and mission accomplishment. The
Model is scalable to provide coherence in a larger setting than originally intended (program
evaluation in the social-benefit sector); it can structure an entire community conversation
about what is important in the community and how to make it real. That is true no matter
how small or large the community; the Model can scale down to model a single individual’s
personal evolution, or scale up for an entire nation.
Return to a constitutional-republic governance instead of corporate-government

governance
Distinguish the “United States” (a federal corporation) from the “United States of America”
(a constitutional republic). What we ordinarily perceive as “government” has become “just
another big corporation” and “just another profit-center” for the Oligarchy to covertly
control through its proxies and agents. “State” and local governments are also corporations,
and all separate their operating budgets (whose deficits they use to justify taxes) from their
capital budget (which they conceal). Just try to obtain a “Consolidated Annual Financial
Report” (CAFR) from any government in this country…

Question all assumptions and beliefs and ideologies; re-educate and re-condition, provide
new archetypes and rewards for self-re-creation, and link those to new missions, through
an experience-based Metaphysics of Quality that actually connects to reality.
Present social and economic myths co-evolved with their blind assumptions and conflict-of-
interest corruptions. They are based on intentional conditioning and ignorance-manipulation.
[Dewey quotation] It is extremely difficult to clear them all out and create mind-space for a
new paradigm. It takes years of hard work even when a young person is trying to do it.
Qui bono? The Oligarchs, the “economy,” or “The People,” and in what proportion?
And how? Apply the “precautionary principle” as opposed to the “profit principle”
Distinguish between human values and market values
Trust our cultural and social “instincts” around fairness and equity
Make explicit all values and visions (using SEP with MfCC)
Make transparent all transactions and all value
Develop standards (“parameters”) for wealth concentration and requirements
for its use (as with “foundations” now, but non-token)
Abandon the chimera of “self-equilibrium” and embrace a dynamic and
responsible model of change regulated according to a chosen vision.
Come out from the shadow of the mythologies of our present “process” (which in practice
relies on secrecy around what’s actually happening) and pay more attention to the result
through substantive content and results tracking.
It is natural that the country whose theories of government are the most unrealistic in the
world should develop the greatest and most powerful sub rosa political machinery.
Thurman W. Arnold
It may be “fair” and “lawful,” but is it effective (as opposed to token lip-service) in
advancing the general good? And is it efficient in resource use?
Eliminate the excuse of the Oligarchs’ servants (human and corporate) that their actions are
“legal” even if everyone knows they are “wrong,” unethical, and harmful, even sociopathic.
The worst excesses of the Oligarchy don’t come from groups plotting in smoke-filled back
rooms. They come from the dynastic sociopaths that naturally climb to the top given the
social systems we (they?) have constructed, who lie without compunction and isolate
themselves from everyone they can. People with no conscience have a tremendous
advantage because of the aggressive values inherent in dog-eat-dog neo-feudal capitalism. In
the same way, networks of sociopathic corporations naturally evolve into coöpetitional
fascism, with the government their straw-dog front-man.
Return physics and evolution theory to the “social sciences.” De-condition people out of
the myths and illusions of pseudo-science and the manipulations therefrom.
Design a social system around the way people actually are, not idealized and ideological
wishful thinking (and not around straw-dog “idealism” and mythological distractions), and
around the actual workings of a closed-system planet. Be congruent with the physical
realities of the human and para-human worlds. Reconsider that Seventh Generation
timeframe: we have rejected it; bring it back.

Include a total-systems-integration overview with no externalities… Our relationship with
the entire planet becomes a Social Enterprise for humanity. Communities, nations, and
international organizations and alliances would have a Social Enterprise Plan structured with
the Model. This would illuminate and defuse the n-Prisoners’ Dilemma (also known as the
Tragedy of the Commons).
Adopt and apply other metrics than monetary
Quality-of-life metrics (unto the Seventh Generation?) in the context of the Model for
Community Change.
Model and make explicit and transparent all value-transactions (not just money-transactions)
in the entire open system. Use the Metaphysics of Quality to generate and apply realistic
values based on the inter-relationship and utility of the things that are presently valued only
as themselves.
Apply relative overall systems values openly and with deliberation. Embrace just enough
mental-framework complexity to clarify accelerating worldly complexity without
compounding it.
Return to explicit personal (and collective) responsibility for the human condition
Public-good “lobbyists” replace special-interest and corporate lobbyists to influence the

dynamic application of values into policy, not the rote implementation of covert policies by
the State.
Eliminate face-to-face contact between the values/vision/mission, parameters-and-design,

and implementation tracks, while maintaining a general broad “liberal” education so all are
conversant with the principles and challenges of all tracks without immediate substantive
interference with others.
Encourage religion-like secular human-oriented belief-systems that provide experiential

feedback and reward for people still in this world; systems that are open and explicit about
their values.
Man’s economy is, as a rule, submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as
to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to
safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods
only in so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of
distribution is linked to interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single
step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that
the required step be taken. These interests will be very different in a small hunting or
fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic
system will be run on noneconomic motives.
Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation, 1944
If we can get people openly talking about their shared values, all else will follow. Without a
values conversation, we get the sterility of self-reflexive lowest-common-denominator self-
serving “reasonableness,” and projection of habitual assumptions found in economists’
political philosophy:
To the free man, the country is a collection of individuals who compose it ... He
recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens

severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the
purposes for which the citizens severally strive.
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
If the “consensus” goals presently in place really did represent the conscious and chosen
aspirations of the “free man,” instead of conditioned indoctrination and algorithm execution,
then this philosophy could succeed at generating a national purpose that was more than the
class-serving agenda of the conditioners. Instead, “consensus goals” default to the lowest-
common-denominator market values that have proven inadequate for social equity and
integrity, much less sustainability.
Shift the focus on “freedom” from “freedom from…” toward “freedom to…” express and
accomplish collective shared missions rather than solipsism and self-aggrandizement. This
shifts focus away from fear (“what we don’t want”) and toward love (“what we do want”). It
would liberate creativity and caring, while limiting the natural downside of the widespread
cultural and individual disorder of our time: narcissism (“Not just your father’s pathology,”
but found in Gen-Xers as well as Boomers, and especially in the aggregate behavior of
corporate entities, where it becomes sociopathic).
Change the values, change the behavior.
Avoid demagoguery and “keeping people apart” within the values/vision/mission part of the
conversation, within the regulation part, and within the implementation part. However,
keep those parts separate operationally even though in principle all persons can participate
conceptually and in expressing values in all three parts. In practice, the actual working
processes of those parts can be mostly isolated so inter-branch corruptions will not rule.
Another way to look at this is to create a government with separation of economy and
state at the policy-making level, leaving only implementation in the hands of the
government. This is exactly analogous to the 17th and 18th Centuries’ separation of
church and state at the policy-making level, and represents the next level of social
evolution. What entity or entities would set economic policy? Ones dominated by consensus
social values (not special interests, expressing human values over market values), addressing
a collective mission, and relying on transparent feedback for reality-testing.
Adopt new “national missions” (and even “missions for humanity”) so people can feel they
are part of something greater than themselves and their solipsistic self-absorption. Base this
on explicit shared values and visions that all can relate to and benefit from.
Properly speaking, “Economic Growth” is not a mission; it is a means. A means to accomplish

what? Have we forgotten? This is an example of how the distinctions of the Model provide
necessary clarity otherwise lacking. What would be the purpose of growth (if it were even
possible in real terms)? What is the purpose of our polity? For whom? Why and how?
Hidden within the present system is the simple fact that the Oligarchs have replaced any
nominal goals of our civilization with their own goals: power for its own sake, at any cost,
with a thin scrim of ideology for cover.
Replace the corporation with a different kind of entity.
A “Social Enterprise” whose charter is more sustainable and Commons-supporting than the
typical corporate charter “to make a profit at any lawful purpose.” In other words, “de-
privatize” corporations into well-balanced, time-limited, ad hoc public-private enterprises

with explicit goals, methodologies, and opportunity costs, and with open processes and no
externalities, all guided by the systems-polity decision-makers. Take corporations back to
their roots. Eliminate “corporate personhood” and “one dollar, one vote.” Perhaps require
that all organizations be Social Enterprises in form and function, and maintain and
implement a Social Enterprise plan based on, and working to express, the explicitly
recognized shared values of the polity (including some approach to sustainability).
Have clear divisions of “public services” versus “private services:” some functions basic to
the well-being of the polity and its people must be performed with no “profit” overhead
(i.e., by streamlined global or national governments or “administrations,” since smaller local
and state governments are too easily corruptible by corporate and Oligarchic interests). This
is essentially the same notion as Adam Smith’s “social goods.” A two-tiered system with
guaranteed basic services and for-profit “luxury” services might work best at accomplishing
our net social and human purposes; and each tier would stimulate and limit the other.
Money (using a true “fiat” currency, instead of a debt-based pseudo-fiat currency)

Basic banking (vs. “investment banks” and the like)
State-owned banks (vs. private banks like most central banks such as the Fed)
Applying Sharia’h principles (!?)
With demurrage instead of interest? (J.M. Keynes advocated this in the 1890s)
Basic liberal-arts and trade/professional education (as opposed to class-oriented
indoctrination in a Cult of Mediocrity)
Apprenticeship in critical thinking across disciplines
Health care and prevention (“wellness,” distinct from the present medical system’s sick-care
insurance), making medical insurance as such unnecessary
Disaster (fire, flood, storm, and earthquake) insurance
Retirement-pension and medical-care floor
Essential life-support infrastructure (for water, basic energy, basic housing, basic diet,
basic work)
Distributed-source personal-use electrical power that cannot be centralized, monopolized,
and metered by the Oligarchs:
either broadcast (a la Tesla and others)
or distributed (a la Jeremy Rifkin, with “alternate sources” and “micro-generation,”
with energy-recirculation over “smart grids”). Distributed generation recovers the
transmission losses of a centralized system, at the cost of the illusory economies of
scale from central generation and control.
Fire protection
Police and “Justice” system, emphasizing rehabilitation and minimizing incarceration
(especially for victimless “crimes”)
Recycling and reusing resources to reduce the junk-to-garbage effects
[International functions: military, diplomacy, commercial treaties, …]
All gains from investment in these basic activities must be socialized. Most private
alternatives should be discouraged (except at a specialized “high end”), lest they subvert the
effectiveness and efficiency of use of the public resources (the “commons”) and distract
from the vision we are seeking to accomplish.
When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and when your only tool is money,
everything looks like it can be bought. If and when we allow our basic needs to be traded for
profit, inevitably we ourselves will one day be sold for profit too, or left to die for a lack of
profit.
Have clear title to, and have all gain from, use and re-use of “Commons” resources such as
air and water, oceans, minerals on/in publicly owned lands, etc., be part of the public

wealth to be shared appropriately.
This “natural capital” must not be sequestered or concentrated in the hands of the Oligarchs
or any other special interest, and its value must not be exclusively monetarized.
Have rigorous standards for maintaining the integrity of the Commons, and be
uncompromising in their enforcement.
Have clear title to, and have all gains from, “social capital” resources such as intellectual
property, government-gathered information, and government-sponsored research be part of
the public wealth to be shared appropriately.
For example, patents and copyrights would expire way earlier than 75 years and couldn’t be
sequestered by corporations outside some system-approved Social Enterprise rôle.
The Challenge
How can we connect decision-makers to reality without corrupting influences like lobbyists from
corporations and other special-interest groups, all in a relatively ideology-free conversation
grounded in actual experience?
Have powerful consensus lobbyists from "the people" and weak narrow-interest lobbyists
from corporations. Contra the way special "economic" interests always divide the public to
get what they want: reverse that process and unite people around explicit and specific
common interests (organized around shared values) published and tracked in implement-
tation.
Have all branches explicitly and specifically (with quantitative calibrations and feedback)
dedicated to the common good, with adequate transparency; anything that overly benefits
any subset of that entirety must pass “exception” tests.
Reverse the willful misinterpretation of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (118
US 394, 1886) that resulted in giving corporations some of the same constitutional rights
natural persons have. This will eliminate the one dollar = one vote corruption of the political
process; go back to net-best-good for people (one person = one vote, plus a strong vote for
the net-consensus collective good), measured in other values than market values, and
compared to standards previously set for the Social Enterprise.
The “market” in its ideological mode has failed to improve the lot of mankind. What’s “good
for the economy” is usually not good for most of the people in it, especially for those whose
labor and productivity make it possible. Open markets are essential but not sufficient for a
just polity. Markets are fundamentally a predatory wealth-concentration mechanism for
separating the masses from their money. Without actively engaging other, more human,
values, markets alone are dangerous.
Functioning “markets” are a small and vital part of a success-enhancing feedback system; we
must always have human values and vision in mind and with highest priority. This would be a
change from omni-present and plenipotentiary “market” values, which would be valuable to
provide some of the more operational measurements of human success.
But then, what become the principal metrics?
Quality-of-life and human-fulfillment values instead of profitability or market share or ROI or

sequestered resources or concentrated wealth...
How do we know? We apply the Model for Community Change, which maintains a values-
centric conversation based on four distinct kinds of evidence from within the overall
process. We also apply an evolved values ethic, such as the Metaphysics of Quality, to
ground and maintain public morality and choice-fields. The Model can provide feedback and
a unifying structure for the entire conversation of a values-based systems polity.
This Metaphysics and the Model work together: both are values-centric and give priority to
experiential knowledge. Both are non-materialistic, in that things are not valuable in and of
themselves. Value in the Model is identified from Distinctions in relationships defined by the
functional flow of the Model; in the Metaphysics values arise from the relationships between
things in dynamic and static equilibrium. Specificity and Precision in the Model is the
equivalent to Quality and _______ in the Metaphysics.
Establish shared values, vision, and mission(s)
Commit and align and organize
Express specialized personal involvement in institutionalized roles:
Branch: Archetype:
Values husbanders (lovers & priests: )
Priority measurers and reminders (priests & philosophers: )
Parameters definers (shaman: science and engineering)
Engagers (kings: organizers and administrators)
Monitors (everyone: )
(feedback in real-time, with “time-value” discounts for long-term vision/outcomes)
All branches in strong, information-rich interaction within branches without face-to-face

contact between branches to be corrupted by “reciprocal altruism.”
However… motivation
We must never forget that it’s not only the “human nature” of people that prevent us from
recovering our polity’s natural-systems integrity, it’s the design of the system our Founders
built, coupled with those individual and group algorithmic human-nature behaviors. Moreover,
the Oligarchs have “tuned-up” the system over the last 200 years, to their own advantage above
all others. All classes’ lives have improved, but less for some, and much less for most. Now with
Peak Capitalism all quality of life will decline, with more decline for the lower class — to the
point of resource-sequestering conquest-wars, plus deaths from famine and pestilence — and, as
always, less decline for the higher classes and least decline at the top.
Even in the most wildly-optimistic scenario — in which Americans elected a “common good”
government into the present structures — the government would be unable to actually act in
ways that fly in the face of Oligarchic interests. Our current government has neither the power
nor desire to carry out radical new policies. Many environmental and energy activists and
advocates [shall we call them lobbyists, too?] realize this, but they can’t escape their
conditioning around the myths of governance (“democracy,” the “rule of law,” …), the false
idols of their polity (“home-ownership,” “freedom,” the “individual,”…., and the illusion of due
process (jurisdiction, authority, standing, and even “fairness,” ….). So they continue to focus

their efforts on:
1. Educating elected officials with complete and correct “information.”

2. Convincing these officials that action needs to be taken or else “The People” (or “the
planet,” or some victim-identity group, or some Oligarch’s pocket entity that is “too big
to fail,” or …) will suffer.
Their ineffectiveness reveal both strategies as fatally misguided.
The first one assumes that politicians have the power to implement the kind of change required.
They do not. Politicians are basically charismatic puppets, representational figures that are
manipulated by the rich and powerful, and who always, in one way or another, do the bidding of
their Lords and Masters (or else). The puppets are pleasing to look at, and give the audience
great “bread and circuses” theater in the mainstream media, but they have no real power. They
are not in control.
The second strategy assumes that policy is motivated by a concern for the well-being of the
masses or of the “commons.” Rarely (if ever) do activists and advocates explicitly frame their
proposals in terms of the interests of the rich and wealthy (although often in implicit and deep-
subtextual ways). They are pitched as being for the “common good” or for “The People,” with
an implicit recognition that the Oligarchs can take care of their own well-being.
“The People” is that part of the State that doesn’t know what it wants.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 1821
In a “systems polity” with a universal Social Enterprise Planning process given operating form by
the Model for Community Change and moral form by the Metaphysics of Quality, “The People”
would know what they want, through a participatory general community conversation that
expresses their values and choices while educating them in the realpolitic of the processes of
governance, de-conditioning them from the myths of governance that they have become
accustomed to accepting so blindly, and providing them meaningful feedback on their progress
toward realizing their vision for the lives they wish to lead.
In a “systems polity,” any non-governmental entity in private hands that is “too big or too
complex to fail” shows us that it’s too big to trust, and too big to allow to exist. Our present
governments are actually parallel profit centers for owners of the “financial sector” and “big
business.” “Government” will be unable to reinvent itself from within; that will require outside
intervention. There must be some parity of power between groups of private interests and a
government that truly represents the interests of the general population as well as of the
commons, or those groups will be the dog wagging the government tail (as is presently the case)
instead of being a tail being regulated (“restrained”) by the government dog.
Imagine a world of falling net energy, global commodity stagflation and shortages, and ever-
scarcer natural resources. Will the rich voluntarily give up their social status (political power) for
the common good — switch from a special interest political system to a systems political system?
In other words, will the rich voluntary give up something that others will even kill their own
children to preserve? Absolutely not. It’s literally impossible.
Unless some workable alternatives can be put in practice, falling net energy and materials
shortages will cause people to revert to a fundamentally different set of behaviors. These are
expressions of the genetic biases that evolved during the thousands of periods of overshoot and
dieoff that have occurred during our millions of years as animals. Those in power will use every
tool at their disposal — including nuclear weapons — to preserve their control of their portion of
the remaining energy and goods, thereby maintaining social advantage for their kin and clan.

To be successful, social, environmental, and economic (that is, “political”) mitigation will
require the full cooperation of the rich and powerful Oligarchs, acting, as always, through their
minions. There are two ways to get people to cooperate. Force them, or inspire them to want to
do it themselves. Forcing them is almost completely out of the question (but remains the
ultimate alternative if all else fails):
Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly
over weapons and communications, ...is simply not a possibility in the modern age.
George F. Kennan
It would lead to social chaos (and, paradoxically, disaster for everyone), compounding
sequential-complexity harm.
The only viable option is to make them want to do it, perhaps reinforced with a vague implied
threat of potential rebellion lurking around the fringes (“withholding of consent,” 10th-
Amendment anti-Federalist positions, and the like). At this late stage, the chances of mitigating
the worst are very small. For activists and advocates to stand a chance, they would have to
focus more of their efforts on:
1. Penetrating the secrecy and lip-service routines that propagate the status quo through
increasingly explicit values, vision, and mission-and-means conversations and invitations.
2. Educating and enrolling the richest and most powerful people in the country and the
world (as well as everyone else) to commit to change.
3. Convincing these people that their ultimate inclusive fitness will be best served by the
proposed changes, and that their interim inclusive fitness won’t suffer, either.
4. Providing credible evidence through time of the benefits to Oligarchs, their positions, and
their property.
5. Making a compelling argument that a well-regulated “systems polity” is the right thing to
do, morally, aesthetically, practically, and even selfishly.
“well-regulated” means the right number of people, living as sustainably as
practicable, with the right level of power-sharing, for the net-highest fulfillment, and
with the greatest grace and joy — all consonant with an accord around specific
standards of fairness and equity practiced in a healthy Commons.
6. Finding ways to have face-to-face meetings with actual leaders within factions of the
Oligarchy, adopting the traditional social dynamic of the Oligarchy.
7. Building individual relationships of trust and aligned interests, and making alliances for
expansion.
8. Finding ways to escalate individual meetings to gatherings of leaders, wherein a new
consensus can be formed.
9. …
Whence the Model for Community Change, which enables a systematic answer to the
community’s and the Oligarchs’ “What’s in it for us?” questions, an answer that would also
support the quality of life of the general population, which will become fewer in number and
thereby more affordable. The Model bridges and informs both the public and the private
decision-making conversations. The general good becomes better for the fewer people
remaining, while “enlightened” rulers continue to enjoy their advantages from ruling a new neo-
feudal “systems polity.” How do we initiate the conversation? How do we apply the Model?
Once we see that the important “us” in “What’s in it for us?” isn’t really the community’s or the
nation’s “us,” but the Oligarch’s “us,” we can take an entirely different approach.

What motivates the Oligarchs? Why do they seek control?
The greatest fear of the Oligarchs who founded this country was that their wage-
slaves/“consumers”/average citizens/chattels would discover how they lived and would take
their riches away (see Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10). Accordingly,
1. The rich want even “well-informed” citizens to focus on political personalities (Obama,
Cheney, etc.) and “celebrities” instead of, say, the board members of the Federal
Reserve Banks, the members of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign
Relations, and their ultimate Lords and Masters. That’s the primary function of our
formal political/economic system: a distraction, a circus, and a multi-layer buffer
between the masses and those really in control.
2. The rich want citizens to focus on motives (debunkable “conspiracy theories,” for
example) rather than the tactics the rich use to maintain control (actual conspiracies).
The universal conspiracy of the Oligarchy is to indoctrinate the masses that there are no
conspiracies, so they can characterize anyone who uncovers and exposes one of their
actual conspiracies as a crackpot.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to
believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the
people from the political, economic, and military consequences of the lie. It thus
becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for
the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus, by extension, the truth is the
greatest enemy of the State.
Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
3. The Oligarchs want their chattels to focus on individuals rather than systems, and on
ownership rather than control (for instance, “The Ownership Society” as a pretext for
deeper financial exploitation). [SIDEBAR: “The richest” lists as a distraction, and the use
of trusts by dynastic wealthy families and clans…]
4. The rich want citizens/“consumers” to see everything in terms of dollars and cents, and
then betray their values and friends and social and environmental ecosystems for money
as an illusory surrogate for existential value and social status.
5. Similarly, the Oligarchs want the masses to calibrate their social status in terms of
material goods (junk that quickly becomes garbage) instead of their fundamental human
purpose, creative accomplishments, and quality of life.
6. The last thing the plutocrats want is "protectionism" to impair exploitation of natural and
social resources; protectionism represents and results from the subversive notion that
what’s good for the Oligarchy-controlled “economy” is not what’s good for anyone else.
In an unprotected economy, everything that can be, is converted to material goods
(mostly excessive junk) and money. The junk becomes garbage and sticks around but the
money flows up the pyramid to the world’s richest people. When something is
“protected” (land, borders, people, minerals, jobs, etc.) those money-flows are slowed.
The ambition of contemporary capitalism is to convert as much as possible of the world to

garbage and money (and, thereby, power). This is the ancient and medieval project of alchemy
transposed to a modern abstract domain.

[SIDEBAR: Evolution scientists have caused a lot of confusion with the jargon “domain.” Domain
means “problem.” “Domain-general” means “problem-general” or “general-problem.” They
should have used ordinary words. Humans evolved no “problem-general” reasoning architecture.
All adaptations exist to solve specific (and immediate) environmental problems or challenges.
Specific problems might be how to obtain food or a mate, kill something, keep warm, and so on.
Economic models claim that all animals evolved “problem-general” reasoning. In other words,
humans are supposed to be contain an unbelievably fast math processor that is able to calculate
all the various probabilities of success for all the various decisions that might attain their goals.
This represents an instinctive habit of using teleology as a political manipulation, as part of
other-worldly religions invented to externalize and objectify the social powers of the Oligarchs.
“Economics” is one such religion, AGW is another.]
By what means do the Oligarchs gain and maintain their power?

Basically, through control and coercion, largely covert (by manipulation, conditioning, hiring
high-ranking servants, the enforced “rule of law,” the rule of men under “color of law,”
assassination, and indirect ownership) and rarely overt (through direct participatory ownership
and explicit force). Overt force, however, is always just a drop of the hat away.
By working as a self-aligning “web of interest” (in addition to outright conspiracy) of interlocking

factions in “coöpetition” mode.
Control Means Advantages
Control Money Central Banks Debt-based “Fiat” Currency (drives out other metrics)
Fractional Reserve Banking
Vertical integration (banks, equities, insurance, etc.)
Can objectify, reify, promote, and regulate debt-bondage
Control Government Republican form No risky Democratic “Mob”

Plausible deniability
Fewer “Representatives” to buy or kill
Custom lobby-defined legislation
Monopoly on force (Police & Military)
Use “government” as proxy for the Oligarchy
Make people financially dependent on “government”
Control Culture Propaganda “News” and Advertising Media

Myths of governance
Religion (“sacred” and secular)
“Entertainment”
Distraction (“Bread & Circuses”)
Fear and conditioning
Make people emotionally dependent on “government”
“Education”
Control “Stuff” Corporations Irresponsible “Veil” concealment

Impersonal sociopathic behaviors & officers
Forum for “coöpetition”
Corps have the same “rights” as natural persons
Clarifies territorial and subject-matter domains
What are the centers of mass of the interlocking factions of the Oligarchs?

Big Pharma (“medical addiction-drugs”)/”Health” Insurance/Medical/Hospital
Petroleum/Extraction/Transportation/Manufacturing/
Banking/Government/
Military/Police/Incarceration/Religion/
”Organized Crime”/”criminal addiction-drugs”/
Media/News/Cinema/Politics/”legal behavior-drugs”/Education/Fear-obsession
Various covert Zionist alliances
FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate)
___??
Who are the Oligarchs? How many of them are there?

Observations through the veils…
A powerful clue: Who is conspicuously missing from the “richest” lists?
The Queen of England
The Pope
Other “Great Names” from our feudal past…
The (relatively) nuveau riche…
The roles of their representatives we can see…
How could anyone prevail against the Oligarchy?

The traditional way: divide and conquer their “web of interest”
Further split the Oligarchy into competing factions and take them on one by one
Erode the “coöperation” aspect of their “coöpetition” and force the “competition”
aspect of the existing factions
Generate emergent new factions within the Oligarchy (e.g. the next generation, but
most are disenfranchised from their principal by their dynastic financial managers)
Compounded by massive civil disobedience and withholding of consent
Always with the subtext of rage and rebellion
Constitutional resurgence: a true rule of law rather than a myth of law
Attraction: protection from other fctions
De- and re-conditioning into the next generation
Build a system that is self-evidently net-better for all stakeholders; allow at least one
generation for that self-evidence to manifest itself.
There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to
manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who
would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in
those who would gain by the new one.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513
And just who would that “anyone” be?

1. Existing factions and sub-factions of the Oligarchy, especially ones who see an
opportunity to advance their own agenda behind a “populist’ drama
2. Newly rich potential-but-not-quite factions of the Oligarchy (despite their evident and
necessary intensified ruthlessness)
3. New coalitions of factions of the Oligarchy with different coöpetitional balances
4. Organized masses of The People who, despite all the Oligarch’s social-engineering-
and- dilution efforts, have figured out what they want and have a good-enough idea how
to get it.
5. Organized masses of The People who have been more-or-less coöpted by a faction (or
group of factions) of the Oligarchy.
6. Organized masses of The People who have become galvanized by ideological fervor
(religion, Cult of Personality, desperation to survive, etc.), sometimes by representatives
of factions of the Oligarchy — a “proletarian revolution” organized and led by defected
upper-class persons. Most historical revolutions have manifest this pattern.
7. Space aliens, perhaps escaped from Area 51
8. The Second Coming, through “The Rapture”
9. Something new and unforeseen…
10. Some combination thereof…
What could motivate them?

We want the Oligarchs’ “us” and its vital infrastructure to increasingly include more of everyone
and everything else as direct complex-systems experience broadens, and the Oligarchs’ vision to
gradually enlarge to include the entire planetary human-life-support system that is the source of
their well-being:
1. Show that there is no longer any place to run, and no-place to hide. There are no
communities gated to air and sunshine. When there are no fish at all, there are no fish
for anybody. All issues are now global issues, and need to be engaged with local integrity:
think locally, act globally.
2. Show that a sufficiency of ignorant and naïve conditioned serfs are necessary for the
Oligarchs’ well-being and too great a quality-of-life and standard-of-living difference
between the classes is increasingly unstable. Never forget the rage and latent violence of
social revolution. The Eloi-and-Morlocks kind of scenario found in Brave New World and
1984 is too extreme, and meta-stable. Moderation consciously chosen to maintain
advantage, balancing the limitless lust for power with the energy cost of suppressing
more and more complexity overhead.
3. Show that a better social model with somewhat evolved myths and more-wise
conditioning will give them more “plausible deniability” as they pluck at the Pleistocene-
heartstrings of their vassals. This leads to a new politically correct rhetoric, a green-
stained rhetoric that is really the same old story in its core power-politics, but modern in
its apparent (yet genuinely increased) inclusiveness. [Example: failure of the Shah of
Iran]
4. Show that “collapse of civilization” (and consequent social revolution) is now credible
(even if primary revolution isn’t), despite techno-fix myths and denial. Although over-
dramatized, collapse is the great counter-motivational stick in this conversation, with
compelling historical and physical-science evidence.
5. Show the Oligarchs that in history the ruling classes have fared significantly better than
the under-classes during times of upheaval. This is true even though those at the very top
are usually eliminated. That threatening fact is now mitigated by the Oligarchs’ use of

expendable puppet leaders who stand in front of the fan.
6. Train the Oligarchs to recognize, take responsibility for, and deal with their tendencies to
denial and their algorithmic behaviors (such as their instincts through breeding and
indoctrination to apply the “Laws of Power”).
7. …
Paradigm-shift for well-defined sub-populations takes generations, a time-frame that the

urgency-hysteria in the current crisis-speak discourages. That style also constrains its
participants to shallow thinking and over-simple discourse; to the attention-span of a scared
four-year-old. There’s a lot of “brinksmanship” in flirting with gradual exposure of the “old
lies,” if only rolling semi-exposure as new, more-appropriate illusions are spun to replace the
ones we let be “revealed” to former “outsiders.”
Paradigm-shift for individuals takes a minimum of three years when consciously and actively
working at it from a pre-adapted basis, and longer (if ever) without that motivation and pre-
disposition. It is not a “rational” process. It ordinarily happens when an older generation of
believers (secular or religious) dies out and their younger successors take over.
How to promote these shifts? By developing new self-myths and new social archetypes for people
to substitute for their old self-myths, self-identities, and social rôles, and by conditioning people
to adopt them by delivering rewards they can directly experience, in both classes, with
variations, and with different starting myths. In the Oligarchs and downward, a new principle-
based regulation, a modern, updated “English Aristocracy” ethos. The “green” anthropogenic-
climate-change hysteria provides a good ground-swell of emotion (principally fear, yet much
genuine caring and an instinctive sense of what supports well-being) to ride this on. It seems
tragically necessary to couple a factional power-maneuver to motivate the practice of
conservation: is there some way to de-couple the two?
Also by showing real improvements in their quality of life for all from the practices of the
systems polity; and, in a polity with a reduced population, greater operating efficiency and
effectiveness, …, …
The social-conditioning infrastructure is in place now (“education,” “media,” pharmaceuticals

[“Soma”], habits of fear, irresponsibility, and dependence, …) to do this. A conventional ad hoc
and superficial “social-marketing campaign” aimed at “everybody” will reach the Oligarchs as
well, and a sub-campaign can be tailored to their particular listening. Their children will carry a
new paradigm into practice, and their children will advance it.
Do we have any cause at all to believe that something like this is not already happening, but
on the Oligarchy’s own old-paradigm terms? And if it is to happen using and developing a
new paradigm, what memes will carry the content?
Where might our values lead us?

We could end “the economy” and replace it with a global system of rationing “necessities,” as
Hubbert and the Technocrats have proposed. At a macro level, rich nations can give poor nations
“necessities” if they reduce population numbers and reduce consumption of non-necessities,
protect ecosystems, etc. This represents a serious political challenge: the old paradigm will
interpret that as class war between nations (or entire cultures), so it must be very carefully
aligned around a shared vision of and for humanity at large.

Away from affluenza, that painful condition, the bane of middle and upper classes worldwide,
defined in a book of the same name as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of
overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of “more.” More what? More
anything that seems to give status (“inclusive fitness”). What happens to “more” in a non-
growing sustainable economy? More becomes “less.” How can this be re-interpreted to gain
status? With new social and personal myths that people can be conditioned to fulfill and thereby
receive a reliable Dopamine hit.
A fundamental change in values might shift our relationship around “stuff’ and power away from
getting and having it toward using or even giving it. To what ends? For what purpose? Some
newly promulgated and explicit personal, clan, tribal, community, and human missions based on
our common values and shared vision. And in fact, without such an intentional focus, our
civilization will maintain its current death-spiral of involuted micro-gratification.
A values-centric system of value might provide a key to unlock the currency conundrum involving
efforts to ground currency in real, meaningful value. Ultimately this sets us back to fundamental
questions of what is of real and meaningful value, how can such value be measured, relied-on,
and distributed, and what is its relationship to operational productivity and quality of life. It is
important to keep in mind that deck-chair moves such as changing currencies will do absolutely
nothing to change the driving engine of depopulation by aging in the Western world and its rear-
guard competition for resources with the surging (for now) populations of the “developing
world.” It has that in common with peak oil (although the causes and outcomes are completely
different) in that the driving engine of the economic change is a parameter built into the world
and will have to be adjusted to and cannot be changed (except over generations).
Had we listened to the Club of Rome 30 years ago, we would have had more time to express
more choices, but cornucopian techno-fix “idiot savants” like Julian Simon, and even relatively
enlightened persons such as Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken, have won the debate and destroyed
through delay the system they sought to preserve. James Lovelock observes that it’s much too
late for mitigation; it’s time to give up capitalism and retreat. What if, instead, we advanced to
a “Capitalism 2.0” or “Human Civilization 2.0” or “America 2.0?”
That might require a conscious engineering project combining parallel and inter-operative
social revolution, cultural evolution, and human breeding, through natural selection in die-
off and civilization-collapse circumstances. Ir would require consciously and rigorously
applying cultural- and social-selection parameters: define a set of workable universal values,
generate from those a vision for a workable culture and society, build a complex mission
with associated means (complete with strategies, tactics, and techniques), elicit alignment
and commitment to that vision and mission, and track activities and outcomes (with lots of
feedback loops all over the place). That’s a great example of social change through cultural
change, increasing responsibility and accountability on an intrinsic-motivation basis more
than the current extrinsic-motivation basis.
This is the largest-scale application of the scalable, iterative Model for Community Change.
After all is said and done, can we answer the question, “What is the mission of humanity?”
We haven’t been able to answer that question so far, and the myths of “The Economy” only
interfere with any explicit vision and mission for all humanity. We haven’t even been able to
answer that question for the mission of our own country, and the breeding of the Oligarchy
to actively and relentlessly divide and conquer gets in the way.
It all starts with an explicit conversation about shared values. What is the purpose of those
values? What is the purpose of humanity? Everything follows from that…

First ask why, then what, then how. Not the usual sequence, as most start with a relatively
unexamined what determined by habit and inertia, conditioning, and immediate advantage.
That why is native to the cultural and biological levels, the least-conscious and poorest-
examined part of the human enterprise [See the Intersection.ppt illustration]. It is through
applying philosophy to those levels that genuine sustainable solutions to human problems
will be found, not at the social, economic, and technical levels.
By philosophy I mean grounded experiential, empirical, trans-disciplinary, open-systems

human engineering with transparency and generosity, and based on human values rather
than market values. It’s more philoandry than philosophy, and it is more powerful and
valuable than philosophy.
[SIDEBAR: Can it be true that the best approximation so far to answering the purpose question is
religion, corrupted as it has been by unconscious primate-band power dynamics and conscious
Statist (in the US, “Federalist”) manipulation by Oligarchs, and requiring reified externalities
outside the human eco-system and direct physical experience, externalities such as “God,” and
“Heaven and Hell”? I propose that humanity can now do better than that, and on its own terms.]
Phase-State Shifts in the Social Environment

Thurmond Arnold made several practical observations: If one wants to make social changes, the
context one sets and the terms one chooses are of utter importance. The actual content and
effect of your change is of secondary importance. That’s evolutionary psychology expressed in
realpolitik, with context analogous to environmental cues. Evolutionary science holds the key to
human behavior manipulation — for switching from one established organic behavior module to
another, from one suite of adaptive algorithms to another, at both the individual and collective
levels.
Environmental and contextual cues are all-important, as they epi-genetically trigger shifts from
one behavior-algorithm to another. Changes in environmental cues are able to redirect feelings
(behavior) from one behavioral module (one set of algorithms for “THEMs” — “competition”) to
another module (another set of algorithms for “USes” — “cooperation”). This can be done
surprisingly easily, given that the differences between “USes” and “THEMs” are largely arbitrary
and often objectively insignificant. [The pernicious and distracting myth of the “Unique
Individual” — divide-and-conquer identity-politics atomized to the personal level…]
Examples:
The Rwanda Tutsi massacre is instructive since it was well documented, and it was easy to
see the transitions from people living side by side, to one side hacking the others to bits with
machetes, and then back again. One striking thing was that the same people who had killed
most of a woman's family re-bonded with the woman, who had managed to escape the
country, and they all carried on as they had before. Both the woman and those who had
chopped her siblings and parents into hamburger explained it as “that was then, this is now,”
and they were obviously sincere.
The spontaneous “Christmas Truce” in trench warfare during the first winter of the First
World War. It was just a phase shift that temporarily took them out of the prior context. This
represents the opposite shift from the Rwandan one.
A similar behavior switch occurred during the Cold War. One day the US and the USSR were
rattling missiles at each other, the next we were cooperating — sending ships and aircraft —
to save a whale and calf trapped in the Arctic ice. This, too, was temporary, as the prior

relationships (about the Cold War and about whaling) reinstated themselves almost
immediately.
When universal economic principles are threatened, government finds itself powerless to
take practical action. Arnold illustrated this point by reference to a shanty colony in New
York City which was being removed to make way for a new building. The newspaper reports
of impoverished people leaving their makeshift dwellings evoked sympathy, but nothing
could be done about it. To give them a dole would have a tendency to undermine the
principle of rugged individualism. After the demolition work began, two unconscious men
were found under one of the dwellings. As if by magic, Arnold said, principles were forgotten
and “pure benevolence took charge.” The most expensive medical equipment was employed
without delay. The objective was to get the men to the hospital, not to discuss abstract
philosophy. Note that in this example individuals more-readily triggered the shift than an
abstract “class” of the homeless. Clearly, the “Us versus Him” module is very different than
“Us versus Them.”
A woman comes into a store and says to the shopkeeper, “One Dollar for a bottle of milk is
outrageous! I am going to take it but am only going to pay you fifty Cents” (The shopkeeper
calls the cops...). Compare with, “I need that bottle of milk for my starving child, but I only
have fifty cents. Please help me save my baby...” (The shopkeeper gives her the milk...).
This represents the same physical transaction, but different shopkeeper behavior because of
different evolved brain domains being engaged. Salesmen have been exploiting this domain-
switch forever. Here’s how growing corporations have been exploiting Americans for the last
100 years: The Century of Self Part 1, Adam Curtis on advertising.
Thus, the perception of context can have a huge bearing on how humans react to, and engage
with, a situation. The dynamics of these phase shifts may share many features with the sort of
phase-state transitions seen in inanimate systems, both behaving as complex non-linear open
systems with emergent properties (e.g., the phase shift). Slowly-driven systems in which the
individual units have a binary choice of states and are affected by the units around them, tend
to produce similar critical-point behavior whether the units are human or nonliving. That’s why
we see a Pareto distribution in the number of people killed in wars: a war doesn't know how big
it’s going to be, just as an earthquake doesn’t.
When humans switch context, they are switching brain “domains” (problem-solving algorithm-
sets). How a situation is cognitively framed can make a big difference in the shift itself, and in
its stability and longevity.
[SIDEBAR: Evolution scientists have caused a lot of confusion with the jargon “domain.” Domain
means “problem.” “Domain-general” means “problem-general” or “general-problem.” They
should have used ordinary words. Humans evolved no “problem-general” reasoning architecture.
All adaptations exist to solve specific (and immediate) environmental problems or challenges.
Specific problems might be how to obtain food or a mate, kill something, keep warm, and so on.
Economic models claim that all animals evolved “problem-general” reasoning. In other words,
humans are supposed to be contain an unbelievably fast math processor that is able to calculate
all the various probabilities of success for all the various decisions that might attain their goals.
This represents an instinctive habit of using teleology as a political manipulation, as part of
other-worldly religions invented to externalize and objectify the social powers of the Oligarchs.]
This context-switch is used all the time by the elites on the proles, but who will do it for the
elites?
[Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? with Plato’s “noble lie” inverted, or perverted in realpolitic.]

Since people make decisions not on the basis of reasoned discourse, and certainly not on the
basis of science, but on the basis of affiliation (“self-context”) and direction from their tribal
leaders and their front-men, then the shift-maker will be social-marketing, a propaganda
campaign to change the affiliation, the “US,” to a larger system, contributing to the integrity of
which requires certain changes…
A “movement,” a re-connection to some visceral primordial earth-experience, some primate-

band social archetype pumped up into today, to motivate and mobilize the narcotized masses.
Incentives from the Pleistocene: dopamine, not money.
The AGW campaign is trying to be something like this, but there are too many “USes” and too
few “THEMs” in the fray (in fact, the “Them” is mostly “Us,” anyway), so focus is diffused and
outright impaired. Faction versus faction of the Oligarchy, each with its own agendas, and
patterns of conflict of interest. Ordinarily the Oligarchs work on the Proles; they also work on
each other. Proles originate little movement-motivation, but can sneak into the “reasoned
discourse” side of the conversation, the least powerful part. What is it that determines factional
ascendancy? How can we know?
Plus, the dread AGW end-game scenario isn’t really credible on its own terms to motivate
change: beyond being an increasingly transparent fabrication, it’s just too slow, abstract, and
distant.
I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it

is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.
Al Gore
We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little
mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is
between being effective and being honest.
Stephen Schneider, climate scientist and environmental activist,

in Discover, October 1989
It’s not immediately viscerally scary enough, and it’s only an illusion of change anyway, for the
AGW promoters want business as usual with Cap-and-Trade-like wrinkles, not substantive change
(i.e., any departure from a petroleum-based energy-regime under their control). They don’t
want people to get too connected to the earth, and most of all not to each other. “Divide and
conquer” taken to the ultimate level: divisions of one.
But the AGW and similar conversations are useful to provide reifiable “objective” principles to
distract attention away from the Oligarchic players’ corporate proxies and practices, and
provide pictures in the heads of both the elites and the Proles. Pictures like convenient “THEMs”
to counter our “USes” against, even if those THEMs are innocent bystanders such as natural
forces, the Commons, Acts of God, or contrived noise to make it unclear which is which. It is
important to always keep in mind that these are all reified abstractions to be manipulated like a
squeeze-box — the pictures, the principles, the USes and the THEMs — with most of their effect
pre-conscious and pre-choice.
Notwithstanding the above, the AGW indoctrination, religiosity, and consequent “public policy”
changes may be the Oligarchs’ systematic attempt to limit economic activity, put a workable
part of a shrinking population on rationed welfare in debt-bondage, and move thereby toward a
rebalanced polity — all while maintaining and advancing their hegemony. In the worst case, that

polity is covertly totalitarian corporate fascism in its operations, run with a stratified and rigid
neo-feudal class structure. The best case isn’t even in the conversation, because the veils of
illusion are impenetrable to people who are already convinced they are “free,” and lack the
knowledge and critical capacities to perceive other dimensions of the simple facts of governance
in place.
No a priori reason exists that prevents a "public authoritarian government" from incentivizing as
much as "private authoritarian government” (corporations). In actual practice in our polity the
distinction has essentially disappeared, with the private covertly subsuming the public.
[Intersection.pdf]
However Again… tools and means

Some genomes are, in net, naturally superior
Some phenotypes are, in net, naturally superior
Some cultures are, in net, naturally superior

Resiliant versus dogmatic
Self-limiting (despite such limitation not being available at the genetic level)
More or less manipulable
Denial-resistant
Low-corruptibility
Courageous
Have a dynamic elite
Openly cyclic from less power-desperation
Rote dynasticism versus genuine meritocracy, which is only possible if detached from
market values, if power is detached from market values
We can put an end to oligarchy and plutocracy, by assuring adequacy of livelihood and meaning-
of-life enhancements no matter what. This would require:
General sustainability or not credible
Reduced population and different ambitions
Redefined US, broader with more systems- and other-inclusion
Social engineering (standards, rules, and laws) versus cultural engineering (mores and memes)
Cultural engineering versus genetic engineering
Present culture on death-spiral

Can’t make conscious realistic collective choices
Individual choices, yes, but mob-drownable by the Oligarchy
Memes
Memes are constructs that have cognitive and emotional hooks into all levels of human existence
(biological, cultural, social, personal). They contain elements that engage pre-existing values,
visions, missions, means, and knowledge. They capitalize and ride on pre-existing identifications
and relationships. See the Intersection.ppt document.

Memes occur and arise spontaneously from the community conversation (mostly implicitly, but
they can be made explicit). A consciously-directed conversation can discover spontaneous
natural memes consonant with the community’s net shared values and vision, which be used as a
tool for social evolution and healthy relationship with the Commons. Memes can also be
synthesized and planted into the conversation to effect a pre-defined policy.
Just as the Iraq war and the War on Terror were assembled memes (for which the “intelligence”
was fixed to support a pre-established policy), the War on Global Warming is an assembled
meme (for which the “science” has been fixed to support a pre-defined policy).
Memes carry codons that represent associations of content that link experiences from multiple
levels with an action invitation and a promise of status. Memes represent a suite of associated
symbols that cross levels (cultural, social, personal), with consciousness appropriate to the level.
Some symbols glyphic, some action/motion connected, some syntactical.
Memes are capsules of tightly-connected, language-connected symbols to activate standard pre-

adapted impulses directed toward social settings and people to elicit action.
So a meme is a story-line that connects pre-existing, well-selected-for, standard somatic and

mental algorithmic reactions through images and words, (mostly simple “names” and verbs).
Like an iceberg, most of any given meme is invisible, deep under the surface of self-aware
consciousness, in the warm bosom of the Pleistocene tickling the twitchy perineum of the mind.
All are grounded in the biological level, engaged at the cultural level (through religiosity and
tribal affiliation), implemented in the social level (through indoctrination and regulation), and
supported in the more-or-less conscious personal and identity-group level through manipulated
“facts” and identity politics.
The Oligarchs (or a significant alliance of factions of them) use memes for cultural
engineering to accomplish social-behavior change. This, coupled with selection events
(civilizational collapse, climate change, political upheaval, famines, etc.) will result in, and
inform, genetic change, by expanding the range of behaviors (algorithmic and de novo)
triggered by different environmental cues and expressed for selection to act through.
Wilber: up-holon, up-Spiral,

MoQ: _______
Abandon post-Modern no-values relativistic nihilism that has resulted in over-reliance on

simplistic market values (memes in themselves), so we must, for the most part, abandon
economics as value-set, as it is a rationalization and concealment of the Pleistocene absolutism
of power
Adopt post-Post-Modern operational superiority of value-sets
Transition: how to give old-paradigm kinds of power to new-paradigm persons and groups
Find, invent, plant memes to activate up-Spiral instead of down-Spiral
The old myths are set in place as archetypes
New myths, transmitted as memes, replace the old myths (archetypes) for the individual (the
identity, the self) and for the collective,

Memes have content native to all levels in Intersection.ppt
Blood: Personal, family, clan, tribe,
Affiliation: Nation, species, Family and Order, “Gaians,” “Whole-Earthers,” …
Can build the dynamic meme: several whole suites of interlocking associations intersecting with
several armies of adaptive algorithms, taking advantage of pieces from other, prior,
conditioning, the more emotive and experiential the better (e.g., movies versus history), pre-
conscious associations versus chosen “reasonableness,” …
Building memes is a craft, as it moves and assembles protons and electrons (not to mention
photons, …) and has behavior- and social-change results that are evidentiary measurable in
terms of human-values and as basis for vision, mission, means, outcomes, benefit, etc., etc.
(that useful Model for Community Change, again). How powerful do we want this to be?
Plant a meme, and then fine-tune it in real-time (“media,” buzz, groupthink, indoctrination,
fear-reactiveness and induced (partly chemical, partly entrainment with electromagnetic, visual
beats, rhythm, …) shock and immobilization and sense of disconnection and disengagement so
no-where to start to act otherwise, no fulcrum remaining for a lever of intention and activity not
consonant with that meme: forcibly implant that meme into the culture.
And here we have the thing replicating itself in a fractal of self-imaging, building the
component-array itself builds the complexity and the productivity and the integration with the
energy demands and collapse latent in any such balance of all the components. Health begets
health. That’s one reason why “sacrifice” doesn’t work. You can’t prepare for peace by making
war, etc., etc. … Law of attraction: what you focus on is what tends to happen, so live and
focus on what you want instead of what you don’t want and (especially) what you are afraid of.
Just be afraid, it can’t be “handled” by doing. So fear memes are inherently unstable and must
be escalated until they collapse (as with the money meme, market values, and irredeemable
debt).
Can we say that memes codify a desired result? Are they teleological? Certainly the
manufactured memes are. That memes are a shorthand for an evocable experience and
advocacy? That memes are in a fractal relationship to their up-and-down-holon counterparts?
Social memes carry codons that represent associations of content that link experiences from
multiple levels with an action invitation and a promise of solidified or improved social status.
Memes are capsules of language-connected symbols to activate pre-adaptive impulses organized

around social symbols and people to elicit action. Capsules work like a virus sheath, carrying
antibodies and activation-sites into any eukaryote cell or organism, its interface, sensor-array,
its fortress/prison, its operational identity, its self-myth, its family/lineage myth, its tribal
myth, its animal myth, its creation myth. Somewhere in there is a “purpose” myth, but buried
deep, except when evoked by warrior-kings, priest-kings, shamans, and so forth through the
social pantheon, who want to pre-empt that general purpose to their own private ends and
advantage.
Are memes inherently advocative? Not the natural, spontaneous memes. Most synthesized,
social-manipulation memes are, and almost always covertly…
Are there primordial “pro-Commons” memes that could be counter to anti-commons behaviors?
(and undermine the memes that are used to exploit them by concentrating benefit from the
commons in the present by exploiting the past and borrowing from the future – no algorithms for
prediction and extrapolation, although some individuals can sort of build a more-or-less likely
result-field from any set of known behaviors — a “model” that has to fly blind about all the

influencers it doesn’t know about (two parts to these, those we know we don’t know, and those
we don’t know we don’t know (by far the majority).
[Pro-commons meme example: biblical injunction to care for God’s Creation (conflicted...) =>
environmentalist fundamentalist Christians. Concept of “usufruct.”]
Interlocking symbols in what arrays?
Exploding-complexity n-dimensional factal-geometry examples, and their arrays to see/project

associated symbols and their interoperations…
Triangle
Pentagram
Geodesic
Matrix
Mandelbrot
(all as rotations & projections & epicycles onto each other… Kepler and Dali, get to work!)
Are jokes a low grade of meme? Do jokes rely on memes?
[Number-of-Joke Joke… the ultimate reliance on association for communication]
Are your ordinary, everyday political, commercial, and religious slogans a low grade of
meme?
CLUE: Sense of participation and perhaps even a whiff of power in each holonic level…
Memes to synthesize for planting on behalf of the Commons, originating in a guided and
structured community conversation using the Model and applying the MoQ.
A good meme will ride the selection process as population declines;
A good meme will tantalize with potential for increased social status
(money is a sterile and distracting surface surrogate for status);
A good meme will promise reward for earned merit;
A good meme will feel good (which demotes the fear-based memes);
A good meme will “carry;” it will “float” through the diffusion-infrastructure (media,
education, hysteria, et al.); it will have legs…
A good meme will self-replicate, “virally.”
A good meme will hook into all levels (biological, cultural, social, and personal), be
energized by pre-existing values in all, and synergized by the “cross-talk” of inter-connecting
symbols and visions between them all.
A good meme will activate energy for action on the missions that are archetypal, grounded in
the lower levels and symbolized in the higher.
A good meme will call for a giving-over to the sublimations for the ancient impulses, to obey,

to command, to flee, to fight, to attack, to cower, to embrace, to eat, to fuck, to kill, to
whatever; and to reconcile the complicated associated algorithm-fields that interoperate to
generate the actual net-resultant behaviors. This is pretty complicated and non-linear, and is
getting more-so, and accelerating at it, too.
A great meme will send shivers up and down properly pre-indoctrinated people (tribes,
cultural groups, language groups all roughly equivalent, activity, religion, association) and
generate a larger future (in human-connectivity terms, not population-numbers and money-
transaction (GDP) terms), a larger future whose richness will actively embrace every
participant in a healthier Commons.
[SIDEBAR: An enrollment invitation that promises more affiliation (with and for higher status) for
participants if they surrender (as distinct from submit) will deliver an evoked surrender that is
ten times more powerful (in terms of unconscious commitment and follow-through) than any
social-level compelled submission (that will evoke resentment and resistance). Once again, we
see we can’t legislate morality.]
War, plague, and famine will be too unselective in generating change, and too fast to control
without the right memes in place. Oligarchy will seek to propagate itself through advantage and
immunity. The Oligarchy will want war, plague, famine, even at significant cost to itself and its
members. Memes are its hook into the human psyche.
Again, how can we show humanity its larger self, its larger identity, its larger myth (in the
psyche, personal and cultural) and sensation (in the culture and in the body) all linked in a
meme. It’s the culture that links the two, the dancing electrons and the dancing protons.
Culture uses language (that’s the ground of being of culture) and complex symbols and evoked
sensations from pre-conscious conditioning and association, and observed, noted, and at least
semi-consciously adapted and influenced chosen modifications to the standard algorithm-
resolutions.
So a meme is a story-line that connects pre-existing, well-selected-for, standard somatic and

mental individual and group algorithmic reactions through images and words, (mostly simple
“names” and verbs). Like an iceberg, most of any given meme is invisible, deep under the
surface of self-aware consciousness, in the warm bosom of the Pleistocene tickling the twitchy
perineum of the mind. Meme-mediated neurotransmitter rewards are greater than those from
more purely symbolic or material successes.
One key to making sense of this application of evolutionary psychology is to “see” —and to
incorporate that view into our systemic thinking — that, although they vote, elected officials are
not the “deciders;” they are the noise-makers. The "deciders" are those who control both the
“environmental cues” (information flows into the decision-making process), and the memes we
use to signify those cues during that process.
Besides governmental officials, corporations also control the behavior of other humans (e.g.,
employees, customers) by controlling environmental cues and the memes we use to interpret
them in the so-called “marketplace” (itself a meme). It’s how corporations came to rule the
world:
As corporations gain autonomous institutional power and become more detached from people
and place, the human interest and the corporate interest increasingly diverge. It is almost as
though we were being invaded by alien beings intent on colonizing our planet, reducing us to
serfs, and then excluding as many of us as possible.
David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World

Sociopathic cyborg Corporations have conquered the human world by controlling the environ-
mental cues to which we respond algorithmically, and by defining the memes we use to respond
to those cues. It's that simple.
We didn’t co-evolve with corporations. We didn’t stand a chance against their covert meme-
regulated coup because we didn’t evolve the concepts or eyes to see them the way we can see
tribal leaders and religious figures. And now that they rule the world, the puppet masters no
longer care if we see the strings.
The challenge for activists and advocates is to find viral memes that will originate deeper than,
and ride on, exploit, and reveal the contradictions in the establishment memes. They will
compel critical comparison of the nominal social reality with actual reality. They will be
Commons-centric in a nominal world that has no Commons (only the “sum of interests”); they
will invite a new kind of experience for people who have long been running on automatic, an
experience hungered-for by the very cells of humanity from time immemorial .
For example, a meme can be used to teach people to see the very corporations (i.e., “juristic
persons”) that use other memes to distract from their hegemony.
We can align the interests of elected officials to ours by substituting “ecological” environmental
cues for “economic” cues, by building a firewall between the “political” and the “economic,” by
redefining the criteria for meriting higher social status, and by placing and maintaining memes
that tend to support the Commons. From that point, our unencumbered political system can go
about the business of dismantling growth capitalism as gracefully as possible.
Miscellanea…
LIST OF COMMON MEMES
Them versus Us memes
“Holocaust”
Sub-memes: “Nazi” and “Hitler”
“conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist”
Us versus Nature memes
(Anthropogenic) Global Warming is an us-versus-nature meme (nature = “climate change”) that

has been translated into an us-versus-them meme (and maybe even into a divide-and-conquer
us-versus-us meme).
Us versus Them memes
Image of a bi-racial couple

“Atrocity” by pre-established antagonist
Super-shock (like 911 hyped by media) increasing susceptibility to nomination of any villain
“War on …” metaphor

Political Mythology memes
“Freedom,” “Democracy,” “…,” “
Money
War on Terror
Religion memes
Resurrection
Heavenly Father and Earth Mother
Afterlife memes (an integral part of religion memes)
Manifest as both natural, biological memes and social-control memes. If you indoctrinate a
man to believe in a reward in the afterlife, then you can suck him dry in this one. This has
been happening long enough that this behavior has entered the genome as an algorithmic
behavior at both the individual and group levels. All aspects of this gestalt have co-evolved,
at the biological level and the cultural level, and the social level, and so it isn’t apparent
that the manipulative ones are still active and being fine-tuned every day. The continuance
of strong biological memes isn’t dominant enough, however, to cover the tracks of the
social-construct memes for manipulation and control by the elites.
Reproduction memes
Control biological memes through cultural (religious) and social (regulation) memes
Dystopic Tipping Point
1984 Stratification and ossification

Brave New World Stratification and ossification
KEY ISSUES:
Net energy (and exergy), human nature (evolutionary psychology), realpolitic

Resources
A Great History of Social Manipulation
http://adamcurtisfilms.blogspot.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Century-Self-2-DVD-Set/dp/B000VA5Z9A
The whole set of four Century of the Self videos is available online; each is 59 minutes long:
Century of Self - Part 1 http://tinyurl.com/wzz4x

Century of Self - Part 2 http://tinyurl.com/8zjhus
Century of Self - Part 3 http://tinyurl.com/crbqcq
Century of Self - Part 4 http://tinyurl.com/2avwuo
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=HED20090324&articleId=12880
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
http://books.google.com/books?ei=_PLKSbrYBZ3gsAOwiPG1Cg&ct=result&q=
%22Bounded+Rationality%22&btnG=Search+Books
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12880
http://www.amazon.com/Darwinism-Dominance-Democracy-Authoritarianism-
Intelligence/dp/0275958175
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Nature-Public-Policy-Evolutionary/dp/1403962855
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07Brooks.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Lincoln_Simon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12zencey.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/philosopher-john-gray-were-not-facing-
our-problems-weve-got-prozac-politics-1666033.html
http://www.amazon.com/Straw-Dogs-Thoughts-Humans-Animals/dp/0374270937/ref=sr_1_9?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238513786&sr=1-9
The “Science of Change:”

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1889153,00.html
Why Isn’t the Brain Green?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19Science-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Global Cultural Evolution

http://www.integralworld.net/abundis1.html

The Quiet Coup
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice
On American Sustainability - Anatomy of Societal Collapse Summary

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5381#more>http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5381#more
On American Sustainability – Complete Paper

http://www.wakeupamerika.com/PDFs/On-American-Sustainability.pdf
Evolution and Human Society

http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/pdfs/Alexander2008HBES.pdf
Ralph Nader, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us

http://www.truthout.org/1014091
America 2.0, Jay Hanson

http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5859#more
Spiral Dynamics
Technocracy
48 Laws of Power

Part 3: The Social Technologies Toolkit
SEP
MfCC
MoQ

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GREEN ECONOMY: There Really Are Non-Trivial

Behavior Changes With Which We Can Approach

Appendices [[Separate: Workbook on application of Model]]

Assembled and written by Alexander Carpenter, Santa Rosa, California, alexander@nmci.com,

Compilation and Original Creation Copyrights 2007-2010 All Rights Reserved

A Thematic and End-Game Heads-up:

New technologies of communications and governance, such as the values-centric, empirical

Another helpful modern technology is the sophisticated, well-grounded, values-centric,

29 March 2010 Page 2 of 84

29 March 2010 Page 3 of 84

John Steinbeck, Log From the Sea of Cortez, 1941

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell (apocryphal)

29 March 2010 Page 4 of 84

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973

A “green economy” must, by definition, be sustainable

29 March 2010 Page 5 of 84

Plato (428-347 B.C.), The Republic, Book VIII

Stagflation will be willfully mis-construed in a growth-addicted polity with a culture of denial

29 March 2010 Page 6 of 84

Even if a steady-state economy — an economy neither growing nor shrinking — is accomplished, it

Two Growth Scenarios with Math

29 March 2010 Page 7 of 84

Here’s some more math, of an engineering nature:

Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, Message to Congress, 29 April 1938

Financially, this “overhead” is the enormous edifice of banks, insurance companies,

29 March 2010 Page 8 of 84

Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the Austrian School

29 March 2010 Page 9 of 84

Kenneth Boulding, 1966

…untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values to

29 March 2010 Page 10 of 84

That means that it cannot continue to use a debt-financed currency in a central-bank-

Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790 (apocryphal)

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Third President of the United States

29 March 2010 Page 11 of 84

The End-Game of Irredeemable Debt

29 March 2010 Page 12 of 84

Kenneth Boulding, Economist

H.T. Odum in A Survey of Ecological Economics, Krishnan, Harris, and Goodwin,

29 March 2010 Page 13 of 84

Money is “unlimited” (a central-bank debt-based “fiat” currency) and ultimately in such

The Straw Dogs are Paper Tigers

None of those is “science” at all; they are components of a neo-feudal confusion-and-control

Money to gain Power; Power to protect Money.

de’Medici Family Motto (apocryphal)

29 March 2010 Page 14 of 84

Peter F. Drucker, Managing in the Next Society

Red is the Opposite of Green

Deborah Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science, MIT,

29 March 2010 Page 15 of 84

Lester C. Thurow, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics, Random, 1983

There is at the core of the celebration of markets a relentless tautology. If we begin, by

Everything for Sale, Robert Kuttner; Knopf, 1997, page 6

Thomas Paine (apocryphal)

29 March 2010 Page 16 of 84

The War on “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”

The present media-conversation about a “climate change” consensus is based on modeling

29 March 2010 Page 17 of 84

To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions.

29 March 2010 Page 18 of 84

Predictions (extrapolated data with some accommodation to non-linearity) versus projections

Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute