Terms of Derision

Planet-killing psychopaths. Ruinators trying to turn the U.S. into RuiNation. Promoters of money over lives. Stupid, evil, or both. On social media I have been saying these things about the people with political and economic power whose actions I perceive to be reducing the chances of living in a world that conforms to my values. The terms were consciously crafted to highlight my judgment of right and wrong based on those values, while conveying characteristics that appear responsible for their actions. Because I value honesty, I've used them in venues where it should be clear that I was stating opinion, and tried to add context by providing explanatory references to sources of those opinions.

For example, "planet-killing psychopaths" (formerly "planet-killing sociopaths") refers to people and organizations whose actions excessively increase the extinction risk for both humans and other species, while apparently demonstrating no remorse for that impact – if they even have an interest in it. I use the term derisively because in my value system the continued existence of life is paramount, especially human life and the species whose existence supports it.

Objectively, I understand that such behavior may be built into some people's nature, or it may have been shaped by personal experience that made it a way of coping with their own lives. For all I know, it may even be a sort of safety valve on the growth of our species, ensuring that we humans are stopped from totally destroying the global ecosystem by destroying ourselves first, with the others that support us as necessary collateral loss. Whatever the reason, the result is bad in my view; and if the result is bad, then to be true to my values I must discourage or work to disable what causes it.

Similar logic applies to the other terms. "RuiNation" is one I made up to describe a "ruined nation" that has had its basic social and physical infrastructure damaged to the point that the majority of its citizens are suffering on a regular basis along with a diminishing life expectancy. "Ruinators" are those who facilitate the existence of such a country. RuiNation introduces quality of life to quantity of life as a value. Because I like to measure things, I include life expectancy, which has a clear correlation to both values. Any action or combined actions that increase the chances of making it so are to be discouraged, as a minimum. Clearly such actions may include reducing such things as: the quality and quantity of health care; the quality of air, water, and food; and access all of these.

My research has shown that money is an abstraction that serves the main purpose of coordinating acquisition, distribution, and use of resources to provide people's needs and wants (collectively, "happiness"). To the extent that it provides needs, it supports life; but when some people use it to meet their wants with resources others require to meet their needs, then it reduces life. This latter case is referred to in shorthand with the term "money means more than lives," applied to those who apparently value their own happiness (specifically, their wants) more than the survival of other people. It is used with derision because of my overarching valuing of life over the material environments that money and its accompanying physical resources can provide, environments that also use resources needed by other species who enable all people to live on this planet.

In some cases, it is unclear whether an action is intentional or the consequence of ignorance. We all have lack of knowledge and understanding, blind spots that lead us to cause bad things to happen (however one defines "bad") without being aware of it; I use the term "stupid" as shorthand for a person with this condition, particularly if it appears to be chronic. If actions are taken with knowledge of their negative consequences, then I ascribe the term "evil" to the person, even though on a more objective basis I consider evil to be a characteristic of actions rather than people. Sometimes (and perhaps more often than not), a mix of intentionality and ignorance contributes to such actions: trying to do one bad thing and causing another. If someone is in a position to know the consequences of their actions but appears to not know them, such as a politician with significant power, then I may ask which explanation holds (either or both) without excusing them for the consequences because they should know what they're doing more than most of the rest of us.

As I understand it, the most successfully long-lived societies survived and thrived in large part due to social feedback that promoted healthy behaviors and discouraged unhealthy ones. Valuing the characteristics of longevity and health has led me to fully embrace providing such feedback as a duty, which I have chosen to exercise through writing perhaps because I am an extreme introvert. I have also become more and more stressed as evidence continues to mount that we all live in a very short-lived society, motivating me to increasingly cry out in pain and judgment against the forces I perceive are causing that. This has caused some people to brand me a scaremonger and an extreme partisan. It's not scaremongering if the threat is real – which it is – and the appearance of partisanship is a consequence of the reality that there is a strong correlation between political affiliation and contribution to whether we will live or die, which is the ultimate value.

Risky Views

I have taken a big risk discussing publicly my concerns and thoughts about the future of our species, which tend to question (if not outright reject) dominant beliefs in the culture that sustains me. My motivation is based on values that were commonly taught to children of my generation and then abandoned in practice, if not in rhetoric, by the vast majority of my peers (and, sporadically, myself) as a price for survival and "success." To strongly adhere to those values – primary among them, honesty – is to threaten both survival and success in the short term; yet, as I have discovered, to do otherwise is to threaten survival in the long term, and cause harm on a scale proportional to our success. Having chosen to take responsibility for both my direct and indirect harm of other people, and then other species, I have found it harder and harder to "go along to get along," especially as it has become clear that the long term is now effectively the short term.

Many other people share my concerns; and my thoughts are consistent with those of people who have been studying the big picture a lot longer than I have, with a lot more institutional credibility than I will ever achieve. Among those people are friends, acquaintances, and former coworkers. Some are actively trying to address those concerns, but the vast majority are keeping their concerns private to maintain what they have, and maximize what their families can have, for as long as possible. Some are buying time to prepare for the disaster they know is imminent, and consider warning the public as a threat to their personal survival since it might accelerate competition for resources before they could secure their own future. As I read the news and read between the lines, I suspect this experience can be generalized on a global scale.

The people who don't share those concerns are waking up to them, fast, as the deterioration of economic and environmental conditions accelerates beyond their range of previous experience and demands new explanations just so they can survive. Some of us ahead of them are willing to share our experience, welcome the chance to help them find the most accurate and useful explanations, and want to work together to maximize our chances of collectively surviving and thriving for as long as possible. We are competing with people with the most to lose, who choose to manipulate public knowledge and opinion with explanations that won't jeopardize the status quo that enables their personal power, which remains far more considerable that what the rest of us can muster.

It has been tempting to try riding out the storm, to follow the lead of those who are buying time, which I have been advised to do on multiple occasions. Even if my personal values would allow it, my public body of work, including books, blogs, and posts to social media, may have already closed the door to that alternative. As my own research, in alignment with others I respect, converged on a plausible and testable timeline for humanity's future and the variables that determine it, I came to realize that riding out the storm was never a viable option for me or the vast majority of people. The best we can do is confront it together, which I have made my life's work as both an act of love and retribution for my contribution to the storm's severity.

Confronting the storm must involve confronting its causes, chief among them the maximizing of population and happiness using all available resources, and the hope that more resources can be found before their limit is reached. For the past forty years I have been aware of this fundamental flaw in our civilization, beginning with an unwillingness to ask and answer the question "How much is enough?" with any answer other than "There is no such thing as enough." Had I followed my own instincts instead of the leadership of others, I might have pursued a much different course in my life; as it was, I didn't really start seriously seeking an answer to the question until more than twenty years later, and didn't find the answer until very recently when it was arguably too late to do anything meaningful with it.

In the months that I've been looking for a job, I've noticed that the vast majority of employers seek workers willing to work under pressure to meet tight deadlines on projects that promote the rapid growth of their business, with success defined as maximum output for minimum input (mainly labor). Presumably any resources left over and not wasted get diverted into profit, which translates into increased happiness (personalized environments) for the leaders and investors, yet the majority of workers have seen their incomes either flat or decreasing. This reflects trends I've seen in my research: average global happiness hasn't increased significantly since humanity stopped living safely off of renewable resources, with non-renewables being consumed more and used to grow more population with the same level of happiness; meanwhile, a small number of people have had their happiness grow exponentially due to our economy's amplifying of wealth based on manipulation of abstractions (money).

With limited resources, global growth – in population and happiness – should have stopped by Earth Day in 1970 to try keeping longevity (the time left for our species to survive) from shrinking; and both businesses and governments should have competed enough to find an optimum distribution of resources (and environments created from those resources) that would serve the needs of the existing population with minimal waste. That didn't happen, and now we've directly consumed or polluted so much of the Earth's biosphere that there are barely enough members of other species that keep the world habitable for us; and one major consequence of pollution – global warming – is likely to reduce their numbers even more, thus threatening our own survival. Unfortunately there are no more resources of the type we need, and there isn't enough time to find additional resources or create replacements.

We need to cut back on what we consume, clean up our waste, and allow room for other species to grow back to a healthy point if that's still possible, which it may not be. I feel compelled to try, and to work with other people who are willing to try, despite the fact that it is unpopular and personally risky; but it is more responsible than any alternatives that I see, and I choose to be responsible.

Self Evaluation

In the Idea Explorer post "Groups, Goals, and Actions" I discussed a framework for making decisions based their impacts on affected groups. Here I'll share a little about how I've begun to use this framework in an attempt to better orient my decisions toward creating a healthier, more ethical world.

I recently used the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which compares the various elements of the framework and prioritizes them relative to each other. I chose a simple set of actions (what AHP calls "alternatives") that could be ranked to determine which was the best to pursue: serving self, serving family, serving others, and serving other species. Each action was evaluated according to a set of criteria, which were all of what I called "goals" in my framework (maximizing happiness, population, and longevity for each group – self, family, others, and other species).

For groups, I gave family the highest priority, followed by others, self, and other species. For actions, serving family ranked first, then serving others, serving other species, and serving self.

I then tried using my own method to rank each of the goals relative to each other without any concern for actions. This resulted in the longevity of others being ranked first, followed by a tie between family longevity and family happiness for second-place. Third-place was tied between population of others, population of other species, and longevity of other species. Fourth place was tied between family population and the happiness of others. Fifth place was a tie between self happiness and self longevity (lifespan). The happiness of other species was in sixth place, and self population (desire to have more people like me) was in seventh and last place. Comparing goal types, longevity was in first place, and both happiness and population tied for second. Comparing groups, others were first (mainly due to longevity and population), family was second, other species were third, and self was last.

The latter results felt more accurate and meaningful to me than the AHP results, given my obsession with the longevity of the human species (how long until we're extinct) as the ultimate endpoint for the lives of everyone who's part of it. My feelings of very low importance relative to everyone and everything else were better reflected in this evaluation, which were likely more a consequence of forced objectivity than subjective depression. At any rate, I'm willing to consider this a baseline for future comparisons.

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.