Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [79]
Though it is impossible to summarize the wealth of information in Jared Diamond's monumental Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, it seems that the inability to see the underlying fragility of the environmental base of the economy was a key factor in the collapse of the cultures Diamond examines.
In an eerily similar way, the Plutocracy in the U.S. is essentially blind to the extreme fragility of the global energy complex, global fresh water supply, global soil reserves and the global public health system. As many authors have detailed, a global economy without abundant cheap fossil fuels will be unable to feed and maintain 6.5 billion humans.
Though neither Grant nor Diamond mentions this specifically, I note that the Roman central leadership obviously hoped that additional regulations and edicts would somehow turn the tide.
The same over-reliance on legal mechanisms, edicts and minor policy adjustments are abundantly visible in the U.S. today.
A Congress of attorneys rather unsurprisingly is enamored of legalisms and policy tweaks, and a plutocracy and welfare class wary of any reduction in benefits and tax breaks is pleased to hope tweaks and tucks will somehow maintain a crumbling status quo.
But as Donella Meadows outlined in her seminal paper, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (Sustainability Institute), adjusting the parameters of a system has limited effects. Tweaking the gas mileage of the U.S. fleet by a mile or two, and 99.9% of all the other "reforms" proposed and fought over, will effect no fundamental change.
What we have in essence is an over-regulated, overly complex, cost-heavy structure which we attempt to "fix" by adding further layers of complexity and overhead costs. The idea that these incremental approaches can change the fundamental structural flaws is simply false; their net effect will be to hasten the collapse of the systems they seek to repair.
This is what I call the illusion of incremental change.
As noted before, Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies suggests that at some point the citizenry of failing societies more or less choose to let their unsustainable systems topple rather than continue the draining attempt to support the burden.
Disunity, complacency, growing wealth disparity, rising military and taxation burdens, fragile environmental foundations--all these need only a sustained drought or energy shortage to tumble like dominoes.
Key concepts in this chapter:
Voluntary Poverty
Asymmetric stakes in the game
Chapter Thirteen: When Belief in the System Fades
In March 2008, six months before the collapse of the global financial dominoes, I posted the essay When Belief in the System Fades, which likened the faith of those pouring their lives into sustaining the status quo to religious belief.
The essay drew a mixed reaction ranging from "you nailed it" to dismissal. Now that the global financial structure has succumbed to gravity, I wonder how many readers who dismissed it then would now modify their reaction. Certainly those receiving pink slips might ponder how suddenly faith in the system can be lost.
The entire Survival+ analysis centers on trying to understand the multilayered ways the middle class is being squeezed to insolvency.
My good friend G.F.B. (also a small business owner, as you might have guessed) likened the tax and fee-for-services system to a parasite and host. The parasite is careful not to extract too much, lest the host die.
But sometimes parasites become so numerous and greedy that they end up killing the host and thus themselves. Perhaps the single key task of the Plutocracy/State (two sides of a single coin) is to convince the host (the middle class) to keep laboring despite the ever-increasing extraction of their earnings and wealth.
The task requires