Contagion

Uneasiness in social media led to a conspiracy theory of my own making. But if it was true, what did it mean and what should we do?

I have a confession. I got pulled down the Rabbit Hole again. As before, my feelings were triggered by a series of events and words in the news, resulting in an overwhelming need to react. The reaction involved publicly sharing both the triggers and the emotional meaning I assigned to them, along with implicit and explicit cries for help to deal with them and options and insights for doing so. Because the reaction was public, it offended people who were not triggered while resonating with others who had been similarly triggered. 

Others have experienced the same thing as interacting groups formed along pre-existing values, biases, and identities, and moved to dominate, cooperate with, or isolate each another based on how much they had in common. This dynamic has been repeated with more and more frequency as feedback loops developed. Triggering events and communications have proliferated, like the effects of a virus that has found an efficient way of delivering its load to the most people, and is simultaneously mutating at such a rate that its impacts cannot be anticipated and therefore defended against. The end result may well be the dissolution of the society.

Intellectually, it is straightforward to deduce through basic logic and observation that the origin of the "infection" and "mutations" might be a very small group of people using psychology and information technology in a sophisticated version of the classic divide-and-rule strategy to hold onto personal power they perceive as jeopardized by most people collaborating with each other. They are gambling that whoever emerges victorious from the conflict will be easier to control than the unified group that was emerging before it; and judging from the experience so far, they could be right. This understanding, which needs to be verified, points to a solution that mirrors treatment of a runaway virus: isolate the source from the population; find and stop the means of transmission in the population; and then safely eradicate the contagion. 

If the problem has been accurately defined, then before such a solution is implemented two big questions need to be answered, in large part because avoiding them has significantly contributed to the emergence of the problem. 

The first question is whether the "problem" is really a problem. Part of the population, in addition to those directly responsible, wants to live in a smaller group that is at least selectively isolated from others, with unrestricted access to all the resources they might conceivably exploit. It is not uncommon for them to complain that they and their values are not respected by the majority, even though they identify with people who for many years have held most of the social and economic power in the world. Competition is the arbiter of what is right, in their minds, and the "problem" is in reality a means of creating the best world.

Needless to say, the majority think differently, myself included. Everyone has an inherent right to live the way they want to, to the extent it does not infringe on another's ability to do so – which means that someone, an agent of all of us such as a government, must track and police the impacts people have on each other. Constantly raising the baseline quality of everyone's lives is as close to a definition of "best" as we have, which includes universal access to basic resources which are considered common and therefore off-limits to private control.

The second question is whether the "source" is a proximate rather than ultimate cause of the problem. If the putative engineers of disruption have specific traits and experiences that can only exist now, then they are collectively the ultimate cause. If those traits and experiences can be manifest in other people, or if some other variable is responsible for their direct involvement, then they as the source are the proximate cause. 

Common wisdom appears to come down on the side of a mix of both answers. Every once in a while, a few people with certain traits get enough power to do serious damage to the majority and must be treated as ultimate causes of whatever problem they are dealing with. The actual ultimate cause may be a combination of genetic and environmental factors interacting over a range of experiences that manifests those traits, which in turn find expression under chance conditions; but that's irrelevant since we can't control it.

I expect that humanity's long evolutionary and cultural history has cultivated a range of traits and behaviors in all populations that offer the best chance of survival over a broad range of environmental conditions. As conditions change, those traits and behaviors that enable survival in those conditions become dominant. The world is definitely undergoing major environmental changes, some which are very obvious (such as climate change) and others which are not (such as chemical impacts on our microbiome), so we should expect and perhaps encourage corresponding adaptive changes in our biology and culture. 

My own research has exposed strong correlations, if not outright causation, between environmental impact and multiple biological and cultural variables. This reflects the tenor, if not the specifics, of more detailed studies than mine, and suggests that what I've called attention to is not so much a problem in itself as a symptom of a larger "disease" we are all suffering from, in different ways and to varying degrees. 

The competitive preferences of the minority and manipulations of those who stand the most to lose from stagnant growth may be proximate causes of the population peak and decline that my simulations imply are most probable. In what feels perverse to someone like me, a decline in population that concentrates consumption among a few, albeit not for long, might enable a smaller number of people to survive longer – but not much longer.

As I am drawn to peer again into the abyss of the Rabbit Hole, I am toying with the idea of focusing all of my public discussion on issues and perspective rather than on individual people (which could still include links to relevant information), including the asking of leading questions and proposal of meaningful answers. The solution I've proposed as an alternative to a population crash will no doubt be a topic I revisit over and over, and necessarily include the treatment of public sabotage as a problem.

Hope Averted

For months since projections from my research converged on a likely future for humanity that culminates in near-term extinction, I have been watching the news for evidence of whether it is true or false. I have been particularly interested in environmental news, and political news in the United States based on our disproportionately large influence on global economics and governance (not to mention its direct impact on people I know).

To maintain my sanity, I treated this effort as somewhat of an academic exercise. I even began writing a "global survival plan" to identify the full spectrum of risks to humanity and strategies to deal with them. This entire effort I documented publicly on the Internet, including almost-daily updates on Twitter. Throughout I was able to maintain a sliver of hope that my apocalyptic version of the future might be wrong or avoidable, hope that was dashed just a few days ago as the choice for president was locked in.

My hope for the future centered on the chance that people could change their values from a focus on gain for small groups to survival of the world's population in time to avoid extinction. Both politics and economics are expressions of values, and they have become unhealthily intertwined with a focus on reaching and then exceeding any and all limits to the number and complexity of artificial environments that can be created and controlled by a rapidly decreasing number of people. It is precisely this limit-seeking behavior that is responsible for our current crisis, as species critical to our planet's habitability are being starved and consumed, and physical systems such as climate that maintain healthy natural environments are putting increasing pressure on them and us.

The electoral process in the United States has narrowed the choices for president to two people who by word and deed encourage limit-seeking, but with different opinions about what social and environmental costs can be endured in the process and who should control and benefit from the environments it creates. Neither candidate seems willing to champion what to me are the two greatest values, life and longevity for the world's population, which would require repudiation of the limit-seeking that has provided their personal power, and acknowledgement of the damage, pain, and death it has caused – and threatens to cause.

A revolution is brewing here and elsewhere in the world as the personal impact of concentrated limit-seeking becomes more painful for the majority. My research has indicated that the concentration is due to a combination of resource scarcity and our economy's reward of the manipulation of money to a greater extent than what that money represents: the manipulation of physical resources to create artificial environments. Unfortunately, most of the revolution's focus has been on manifestations of the latter, economic flaw, and not on what is becoming the dominant cause: resource scarcity. That focus seems to be behind the political calculations of the revolution's leaders, which allow up to a decade or more for it to reach fruition (assuming the rational candidate and her collaborators get power), but there is much less time to deal with the resource scarcity problem.

All political and economic actors now and into the foreseeable future need to make repairing our relationship with the biosphere their top priority, while working to heal the relationships between people so we can minimize pain and death along the way. I have felt the urgency since I first discovered the dynamics behind it, and as one of those actors (as we all are now) I have struggled with my own similarly opposing priorities – self vs. planet – without satisfactory resolution. Hope that the worst outcomes could be averted sustained me, despite growing evidence that it was groundless. With what I perceive as a fatal delay now officially built into the political system of the most powerful nation on the planet, and an uncomfortably high probability that the delay will be replaced by negative action (if the Republicans win), I can no longer even act as if hope is justified.

Hope and fear both attract followers, which was starkly evident during the recent political conventions. I am not seeking followers, nor am I attracted to fear. If the longevity of our civilization and our species is as limited as it appears, then I believe we must try to make those last days as honorable and decent as possible, just as we try to do as individuals with our own, always-limited lifetimes. It's hard to remember that sometimes, especially when in the grip of despair as I have been episodically during the past three years; but writing this has helped, and I write it to also help others.

Martian Dreams

Watching the movie The Martian recently reminded me of the boundless hope that for most of my life motivated me to look to the stars for meaning, knowledge, and salvation from the doom that seemed to be an inevitable consequence of confining humanity – and life – to just one planet. It also inspired me to use the tools from my current research to revisit the possibility of reviving that hope.

As related in the memoir chapter of my book "Death Stoppers Anthology," that hope was a consequence of influences and events since childhood that were strongly linked to the U.S. manned space program and its showcasing of how human ingenuity could triumph over adversity and despair. During the late 1990s, I became convinced that settlement of Mars was the best next step for ensuring the long-term survival of our species and others that we could take with us. Along with other members of the Mars Society, I worked at convincing as many people as possible that manned exploration missions as a precursor for settlement could and should be launched soon. Discoveries since then, culminating in the discovery of liquid water, a necessary resource for life, have made the argument for sending people to Mars even more compelling. Clearly the author of The Martian was up to speed on the motivation and the technologies that could enable the first missions, and has provided a relatable vision that can help do the sales equivalent of "closing the deal."

Even back in my Mars Society days, I feared that escalating problems on Earth with a strong environmental dimension might soon close the door on getting people into space and supporting them long enough to create at least one self-sustaining community. The Martian does an excellent job of portraying the hazards involved in trying to sustain life for even a modest amount of time without such support in a hostile environment similar to, if not much better, than the places space travelers are likely to find themselves. The movie also demonstrates in one scene my greatest fear for our immediate future: the loss of "provider" species that enable "supporter" species to survive and generate the basic resources that people need to live. Wherever we go, beyond our planet as well as here, we will face the same limits; and early explorers and settlers in space will be precariously living very near those limits all the time.

My current research is the latest phase of work I began while in the Mars Society in order to estimate how much and how fast our population could grow if we settled space.

Preliminary simulations using the new model are consistent with my earlier conclusions, which support the observation that motivated that first project: exponential growth is fundamentally unsustainable. Like other species, but unhindered by predation that keeps their numbers in check, humanity grows as fast as it can with the objective of dominating its environment. If by settling space we expand the amount of resources that we can either reach or grow, then we will concurrently increase our consumption of them – very likely exponentially – until we either can't or decide not to.

Hope in my case stems from what I believe will occur in that last stage, and whether or not it is possible to keep our resources from decreasing on their own due to our actions. Will we as a species make the same choices as the hero in The Martian, who to me epitomizes the best of humanity in his values and unwillingness to give up in the service of something bigger than himself, or will we – as my study and extrapolation of history suggests – push the limits in pursuit of personal pleasure at the expense of other lives and ultimately our own longevity?

Employment and An Ideal World

Having accepted that common values and understanding are critical requirements for an ideal world (or even a healthier one), and the likelihood that crippling stress would return if I didn't contribute toward creating that world, I decided to look more closely at the kinds of employment that would help meet those requirements and meet my near-term financial obligations while my writing business was ramping up.

Nonprofit issue-oriented organizations are an obvious source of employment that addresses values, especially religious ones. I prefer organizations whose values are most in line with my main value (preservation and proliferation of life for as long as physically possible), yet provide opportunities for open-ended discussion about them and others while not undermining understanding of reality in the process.

Science is my principal model for understanding reality, so organizations that promote science are a clear choice for working toward meeting the associated requirement. There is, of course, a lot of subjective reality we all experience as humans, which needs to have common interpretation (understanding) identified, and I see psychology as a promising means of achieving that.

It would be great if I could find an organization that promotes both values and understanding, which I'm trying to do with my own business. Many issues-based organizations do this within the narrow range of their interests; but by doing so, they tend to discourage participation by people who don't share those interests (I admit being guilty of that myself). More research is clearly needed into finding or creating a viable alternative.

Finally, regarding the remaining requirements: I have for a long time considered joining organizations involved in environmental cleanup and renewable energy, which deal with the requirement involving management of the commons; but I recently realized that they are fighting a losing battle against a complex and cunning enemy enabled by not meeting the first two requirements. I'm therefore less likely to pursue work with them, though I won't rule it out entirely. The same goes for government, which has the theoretical power to enforce responsibility for maintaining the commons and ensuring that only extra resources are allocated by the economy, without detrimental effects; that power can be properly used if everyone supports it and its use, which again depends upon common values and understanding.

A Year Toward Happiness

By virtually any standard, I've had a good year. I found a job with a company that benefits from my strengths, has the potential to help make the world better, and is improving my family's financial condition. I'm getting healthier by eating smarter, and consuming smarter by driving a more efficient car and considering the social and environmental records of the companies that make what I buy. Last month's election could have resulted in a rapid acceleration toward oblivion, but it didn't.

Yet I am nowhere near feeling happy, mainly because oblivion is still ahead of us. The fire that pulled humanity out of the stone age is beginning to engulf our world, yet we continue building and using the equivalent of more powerful blowtorches. The recently completed talks on climate change demonstrated that this is unlikely to change before the firestorm becomes self-sustaining and unstoppable. Planning for the future is looking pretty futile, except for deciding how to resist the causes of our problems.

I've recently felt overwhelmed to the point of frequently losing sleep. For years, I looked forward to having at least as much knowledge, understanding, and wisdom as I do now; answers to most questions come much more easily, and the path to answers I don't have is typically quite obvious. Bursts of insight that I used to celebrate because of their rarity now occur as streams rather than bursts, and most reliably when I'm facing a problem or a commitment; and I am currently facing several of both.

My life is a microcosm of the dying world we are a part of. I accelerate just to keep from losing ground, yet that ground is growing soft and fracturing beneath me because of the weight and stress of too many of us doing the same thing. My instincts and best judgment scream at me to slow down, to make the most out of every experience rather than moving headlong from one to the next. I know that if I take the time to know the ground, I can find ways to stabilize it so it will be around when either I come back to it, or someone else passes along more safely for my efforts. Left to my own devices, it's what I prefer to do; yet I live in a society designed and tweaked to make speed rather than substance, to grow at all costs -- and all costs is what it will ultimately pay if it doesn't change its goal.

For years now, I've written about my struggle to repent for, and end, my contribution to the sabotage of the world's future. In many ways my happiness hinges on it. While better equipped, I am still weak. Having some of the answers and taking some steps is good, but still far from good enough.

Reconnection

This week marks 20 years since my father, Art Jarvis, died of a heart attack in the middle of a typical day trying to improve the education of kids as the last of many contributions to making the world a better place to live. For years, we spent a lot of our time together discussing issues over a wide spectrum, from the dynamics of our family to math, science, and the lessons he'd learned from a deep and broad background about how society works – and doesn't. Shortly before he died, he paid me the ultimate compliment: that we were alike in the way we thought, except for experience. I've noticed considerable differences since then, but still encounter situations where his wisdom comes to mind, typically in the form of sayings he either learned or created to summarize the core of an issue.

I've been sick at heart lately as my confidence in the salvageability of a livable future slips significantly almost every day. I miss my father more than ever in these challenging times, and wonder what he would say about what's happening and what to do about it. If you'll allow me, let me slip into my fiction writing mode, and channel the part of my father that lives inside me to imagine how a conversation might go between us.

***

BRAD: Hi, Dad. I can't tell you how much I've missed you.

ART: Me too, buddy.

BRAD: A lot's happened since you left.

ART: I'm sure it has.

BRAD: The family's a lot different. For one thing, I got married, if you can believe that.

ART: I figured you might, eventually.

BRAD: I also became an atheist.

ART: Really. How did that happen?

BRAD: After you died, I followed your example. Did a lot of studying, a lot of thinking, and was even fairly active in a couple of churches. Finally I realized that although many of their values made sense, they were man-made: taught by myths but not dependent on them. I dropped the myths, kept the values. Even refined them a little.

ART: What did you come up with?

BRAD: Maximizing life and happiness, first with people, then with other species, with the recognition that we're all interdependent and important.

ART: That's a good summary. It pretty much covers them all.

BRAD: Exactly. It's changed a lot about how I think about things.

ART: I'm sure it has. How's the business going?

BRAD: I had to walk away from it. We tried, we really tried, but it was too much for just the two of us, and then Eleanor had to leave. I had to survive, so I decided to try other things.

ART: What? What are you doing now?

BRAD: Believe it or not, I'm back doing test engineering, and my own writing on the side along with some music. I was also a technical writer for a few years.

ART: Technical writing? We used to do our own...

BRAD: I know, I know. You remember how you used to bitch about how bad help files were for software? I tried doing it better. Can't say I always succeeded, but it beat finding everyone's mistakes for a living, where I got a little too cynical for my own good.

ART: Is it working better for you now?

BRAD: It's complicated. That's what I hoped to talk with you about.

ART: Okay, let's have it.

BRAD: Remember how much fun we had asking questions no one else would ask because they thought the answers were too obvious?

ART: And we found other answers. I was proud of that.

BRAD: I never stopped. I think it's part of my DNA. After you died, I started questioning all of the basic assumptions in my life. The religion thing was a big part of that. I also got a job testing telecom equipment, and found a lot of bugs thanks to what I call my "special skill." I started to find problems outside of work too, especially when I started applying my new value system. Because life is paramount, I got interested in the possibility of Earth being hit by asteroids and comets, and realized that we're all pretty vulnerable to extinction by something too few people are taking seriously. The life test also pointed to the need to settle other planets, to avoid extinction from a warming Sun. I got into promoting Mars exploration as the first step toward dealing with that threat. Then I learned about another threat, far more insidious but just as deadly.

ART: What's that?

BRAD: Humanity is responsible for a mass extinction event, potentially as large as any caused by an asteroid collision. It turns out that other species do a lot to keep the planet habitable, and we're killing them off by stealing or destroying their habitats; polluting the air, water, and soil; and hunting them to extinction. Part of the pollution comes from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil, which is causing heat to be trapped by the atmosphere; that leads to extreme weather such as droughts and mega-storms, melting of glaciers and the polar caps, and release of even more potent methane from permafrost which could amplify the effect by orders of magnitude. The carbon pollution is also acidifying the oceans, threatening the base of the food chain. By the end of this century, we could be all but extinct.

ART: A lot of other people must have figured all that out.

BRAD: The scientific community has done a great job nailing it down. Many have abandoned their normal reticence and are sounding the alarm big time. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industry and others who depend on them have a stranglehold on the media and several governments, including ours, which is making it all but impossible to do anything meaningful about it before it's too late. I did my own research over the past few years, and it shows what looks like a clear correlation between humanity's impact on ecosystems, the populations of ours and other species, and people's happiness. I'm projecting a peak in world population in about 20 years, and a drop to zero within 60 years. My conclusions align pretty well with those of people who have done a far more thorough job of studying these things.

ART: That's quite a story.

BRAD: I wish it were just that. If I still believed in God, I might be able to delude myself into thinking that a miracle will happen to make everything okay. Unfortunately, as you used to say, "it ain't gonna happen," and the people who think that it will are dragging their feet, making things worse for all of us. Recently, I've been feeling that it's all hopeless.

ART: Remember what I used to tell you about feeling sorry for yourself.

BRAD: Like your dad said, "Run in place until you kick yourself in the ass." I remember.

ART: So what are you doing about it?

BRAD: I took this test job with a non-profit that's building a national network to monitor ecosystems. It's pretty cool, and a way to contribute to the science that can tell us how things are changing.

ART: That's great, son.

BRAD: I'm worried that it won't have any effect on what's happening, though.

ART: Let me guess. With all the information that's already out there, the idiots won't listen. What are the chances they'll pay attention to even more data?

BRAD: They're also enthusiastically trying to destroy ecosystems. They just don't value nature, except as a pile of resources to be exploited. Come to think of it, that's the way they view people too. Remember why I didn't pursue astronomy in school?

ART: Vaguely. I'm afraid I had something to do with that.

BRAD: That was during the '70s energy crisis. I figured it would be irresponsible to focus on what to me felt like mental masturbation while humanity was in danger of burning itself up by pursuing energy just to have more. Later, with the asteroid thing and the understanding of the Sun's future, I realized that science could illuminate what's coming, and how to create a better future, in part by recognizing and confronting threats. I was more interested in using science to explore options than contributing to the science itself, but it was important to know the science first. You showed me that education was key to getting people to even pay attention, and that's part of why I stuck with you on that; the other part, the biggest part, was that I loved working with you.

ART: I suspected that.

BRAD: But now I realize that even education's not enough, just like science isn't enough. Even knowing the options isn't going to solve the problems, or being able to show clear logic leading from cause to effect.

ART: I think you're going off the deep end, there. People just need to be shown...

BRAD: ...How to pursue enlightened self interest. I know you believe that. It was behind everything we did together. Unfortunately, beliefs are far more powerful, particularly when they're shared by one's community. They become part of our identity. When you challenge them, you challenge people's identities. You throw into question the value of all the things they did in support of them. You threaten to devalue their lives.

ART: But if they realize they're wrong, they can find something better. More happiness, to use your term.

BRAD: Not if a large part of their happiness – and the power that enables it – derives from their community. You'll have to convince the whole community, or force them into a situation where the community loses influence over them, like what happened to me after you died. Also, the risk of finding something better is losing what you already have; and it is a risk, because you may not find something better.

ART: That's an interesting theory...

BRAD: You taught me to think for myself, but you had your own value system superimposed on top of that, which because you were so smart, and had so much experience, I didn't really question until you were gone.

ART: Anecdotal evidence.

BRAD: Sometimes that's the most convincing kind. Like when it's yours.

ART: I think you're wrong, though I respect your reasons.

BRAD: You're proving my point: It all comes down to beliefs. And, for the record, I still respect yours. I also respect your judgment, as much as ever. So what do you think about all this? Is there hope?

ART: The people I grew up with did some amazing things in just a few decades, under similar conditions, with a lot at stake. Yours can too, if you have the stomach for it and don't give up. Take a deep breath, start running in place, and then do what needs to be done. I'll bet you won't be alone.