How are we to understand this? Heartless, bloodthirsty people with no moral compass? Bored, diminished people with no interests beyond the most immediate and dramatic sensations? A deeply divided and class based society in which some humans were considered human and others were rejected from the human family? A society that valued on the basis of some artifice and not the living condition?

I remember the shock that attended my first learning of gladiators; not the moment itself (most likely associated with a Hollywood film), but the sensation of disbelief laid over by the certainty of actuality; an incomprehensible abyss separating two clearly true and incompatible things. It is a sensation that has revisited me many times and that is as poignant today as at its first occurrence.

‘There must have been something wrong with the Roman people, with their leaders and societal trendsetters.’ This was as far as my thinking went for many years. The details of a world in which slavery was common place; where war was conducted ‘man on man’ from arm-length distances with knives; where the elite didn’t do any work other than to manage their social relations and wealth; a supporting caste saw to the delivery and distribution of goods and services; and a vast population of poor supplied the muscle and struggled with daily survival needs; this was all foreign to my small town experience and formal education about the rights and plights of humanity. Understanding that place and time has become more and more important as my own immediate society begins to look more and more like the Roman society that I could not comprehend as a child (not only the Romans, they just stand as the pinnacle example).

I am not making the facile comparisons of real gladiators with the WWF or wage slavery with the indentured slavery of Rome. It is rather a whole set of designs and behaviors adapted to our time and technologies: it is a descent into meanness of spirit and narrowness of vision; it is about easy fear and easy escape from fear; it is about all the normal and expected human behaviors made bigger and more concentrated than a society can stand.

Rome is only a metaphor. I don’t really care about Rome. It is now, yesterday and tomorrow that I care about. “Think of the children” is not trite. If you believe this trite and simple minded, then I would happily remove your head with a short sword. The people of Rome were not thinking of the children. The elite made their children into monsters. We are making our children into monsters; because children will be made into the image of their society. The children, in their biological wisdom fight back until they are ultimately overwhelmed with materialism and the incomprehensible abyss; they do give up. Giving up means that the human body and mind are distorted into some, primarily, economic form and are left to express what is left of their humanness in twisted and destructive ways like depression, obsession with powerful biological drives and (mostly) passive violence.

In Rome the people had each other. In today’s world we have media. Nothing of consequence was delivered into the homes of the Roman citizen, and so they had to come out. There was money to be made by giving them a place to go. For our world there is money to be made, vastly more, by delivering into the home something to do. This changes things.

I believe that the concentrating effect of mass activities led to the bloody arena, but it was forces like those that we experience today that supplied the push. We are able, today, to design and deliver all manner of distraction. While Rome did have pictures, it did not have moving ones. Movement requires real bodies; real bodies in real movement bleed real blood. We might be a very long time away from real killing as public entertainment, but we are fully in the world of the twisted. Our media, be it information media or the distracting media, is filled with images of power; power abused, power used, power vastly more accessible than it is in our daily lives: it is in the gun, it is in the martial artist, it is in the wealthy, it is in the supernaturally stimulated, it is in the ruthless and the mad. And it is to power which we, like remora, wish to attach ourselves no matter how tenuously.

A design begins to reveal itself. As the people feel power in their own lives they do not support and sustain the power of their leaders, but rather expect them to function as organizers and suppliers of the services of governance. As the people feel less and less power the more they grow the image of power in others to whom they may attach in some fashion – primarily that of believing the powerful to be representatives of their needs and safety. This draws out the most distorted of behaviors the way a poultice is supposed to draw out the puss from a sore.

The individuals drawn to power over others are never those who can be trusted with such power. Some people will accept the need to take on a responsibility, but to actively seek authority over other human beings is a pathology rather than a vocation. In a world where everyone has personal power in their own lives sufficient to see themselves as in charge of their destiny, those who seek more power must simply serve to attain some sense of authority; and they will always be ‘brought up short’ by their community when they overstep (which they will do consistently).

If the people become less personally powerful, due to some perturbation in their world, an opening is made for the power-hungry to begin the process described above. And such perturbations always come. So it is that human societies have cycled through egalitarian and despotic governance. Despotism will, like a bad parasite, kill its host, the people will be thrown back onto their own resources and, in being personally powerful again, require governance that supports the community and not just the interests of the leadership.

Another dynamic is that the power-hungry are certain to come to an understanding of the role of distributed personal power in their quest for power over others. Since it is to their advantage to reduce both the real power (difficult) and the perceived power (much easier) of the people, ‘those who would be King’ make such reduction a major goal. They are supported in that effort by all the parts of the society that are disbenefited by empowered, self-possessed individual citizens.

From here we can return to Rome, to the Coliseum, to the cheap seats, to the psychological needs and state of a people without sufficient power to control their lives. No one person or group of people conspired to create a stadium, a city, an empire full of people whose dependencies reduced their personal power to such a low point that the most basic needs for security and safety sought a source of power outside of themselves. It was the combination of population growth, economic growth and design, rapid social change exacerbated by the very process of empire; and the release of the power-hungry (amplified by the systemic real powerlessness of a society out of control) to dominate others.

It was not the blood on lascivio agri that drew the Romans to the stadiums; it was the hole in their souls, hollows left by the loss of their immediate and daily capacity to be in charge of their own life experience.

It is not the mature pleasure in CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, The Terminator, Batman and the others in the endless string of blood sport “entertainments” that fills the couches and the lazy-boys in isolated living rooms across the nation; it is the holes in our souls.

I think of the prescient observers of the decline of their Rome looking desperately for some salvation, something to change the course of events. Eventually even they must have said, “Let’s just get this over with.” Our situation today is different in a number of regards. One is the desperation of facing a biological limit for all of our actions, but another is that the tools of our distractions have the potential to communicate rapidly and clearly with huge numbers of people. Our direction is actually changeable.

The Great Many have been diminished in their sense of power, even as they still retain real power if they could recognize their own best self-interests and organize around them. And the dangers are not 100 years, 300 years in the future: the barbarians are at the gates in the form of ecological collapse. Those “leaders” who refuse to see the immediacy of our dangers are, everyone, benefited in the moment by that refusal. The acquired ‘helplessness’ of the Great Many must be recognized for the terrible, perhaps insurmountable, problem that it is and must be given the deepest consideration, but assuming that it is addressable:

The present world is not Rome, but has come to its own and new place driven by the same human forces. Getting it wrong this time will not simply lead to the rise of Constantinople and the empires of a new Middle East, but will shock the biosphere and change all of life on earth.

This is the situation that the whole world faces. The major points of contact with the information that the world’s people require in order to make personal and societal decisions are primarily: TV, radio and print media, and internet sources that are driven by these sources; other internet sources are more correctly called propaganda tools regardless of their ideological position.

The primary “news” sources lay claim to some degree of neutrality and veridicality; but, they only pretend “neutrality” on issues that do not directly concern their owners or the self-interest of individual reporters and “news” departments. They use the cheap device of giving “equal time” and authority to positions whether or not there is any valid reason to assume equality; they always distort and ignore news that would negatively impact the economic and political elite.

The consequence is that there is no consistently reliable source for vital, informing descriptions of the conditions of our world. We cannot act with any confidence that the information upon which we must act is accurate. While we know we are being lied to, there is no source that stands as sufficiently honest and unbiased that we can use it as a reference to measure the maelstrom.

Of course, some people with enough time, experience and determination can often piece together descriptions of events in ways that they might reasonable trust as veridical, but there is little or no way that their efforts can be generally disseminated – or for that matter, separated from the propaganda that is boiling up as a substitute for real information. So, regardless of the motives, of which there are many (to be looked at more closely in moment), the result is the almost complete impossibility of the general public having the information that they require to act in response to the actual events and processes going on in the world. This is the loss of a most basic survival tool: accurate information to inform action in the environment.

Insidiously, the non-news part of media acts to set the base-line expectations for the “news” itself. ‘Every’ person in TV dramas carries a gun, drives a Land Rover, uses a satphone and lives in a million dollar house or condo; even if they have a 50K job doing what, in the real world, might be some form of accounting. ‘Everyday-people’ have al Qaeda sleeper cells in the house next door to them. Serial killers roam the streets of every neighborhood. And personal success and satisfaction is never ever seen as a moment of quiet reflection.

If we average the content of the lives we see portrayed on our “home theaters” and compare them to the actual modal lives of American citizens, the disconnect rises to the level of the pathological: the stories that we tell about ourselves have absolutely nothing – nothing – to do with the lives we lead, even as we attempt, as we always have done, to model ourselves after them. For every film like The Remains of the Day, there are hundreds where the moral choices are drawn in crayon and gratuitous blood.

People embrace the entertainment media, giving it 50, 80, even 100 % of their non-working life (and many times part of their working life) not so much to be entertained, but to be part of the common human experience. If people felt fully connected to flesh and blood people, then they would not spend 5 hours a day watching 2-dimensional electronic representations of people that they can’t know, can’t touch or ask a question. If people felt informed and competent in the execution of their lives, then they wouldn’t so desperately seek the slick and phony “competence” of media “heroes.”

The professional news media is now only an extension of this pattern. To a large extend it is competing with fictional stories, with the carefully rehearsed control of emotional content and production values, while at the same time purporting to discover and extract accurate descriptions of events and behaviors that talented and powerful interests wish to remain hidden. My critique in no way is intended to suggest that this social role and responsibility is easy, only that this vital role is being thoroughly mishandled and abused.

The reasons for the abuse run from the most mundane to the most violently draconian. Reporters and editors have often been the targets of the forces who wish not to be reported on. In 2006, 81 journalists were killed (other accounts give the number as 110) and 871 were put in jail worldwide. 2007 saw 86 (95) killed and hundreds more jailed. The assumption is made that the vast majority of the journalists so treated were acted on in response to their reporting things that someone really didn’t want to see made public. A message was being sent: speak and die; this would distort what is reported on.¹

But there are many other ways to motivate the distortion of information. Limbaugh is reported to have a 400 million dollar contract! Top TV “news” anchors are all in the 6 to 8 figure range. These amounts of money create organized interest groups deep within the media beast with a disproportionate voice in how stories are framed so that the “news” show can ‘get its story’ day after day. The self-interested corporate ownership of media has its own influence.

At the other extreme the public must be appealed to to watch and listen. This has become about polling and presentation, personality and production values, matching expectations and desires more than giving the most straightforward accounting of events no matter where the chips may fall – there must be no chips, though sparks are good, i.e., there must be no real consequences, just shiny things to distract attention. If real substantive stories with real consequences that led to human action were presented, people might come to expect, and eventually demand, substantive information…. And then there would be the danger of the numbers a couple of paragraphs above going up – it is a tough decision: package a dishonest product, have sycophantic fame and make lots of money… or tell the greatest truth that can be divined from the muscular digging of evidence and be ignored, rejected, threatened, fired, jailed or killed.

What matters, what gets lost in the wailing over this and that specific crime against the public good, is exactly that, the public good. Just as wind sailors died from the lack of specific vitamins, so societies die from the lack of accurate information on the vital details of life. A social order cannot sustain on lies. It is just so simple: the biophysical world in which we live requires that it be responded to from veridicality. The ‘vascular system’ through which is pumped the information necessary for societal and individual survival is diseased and failing. The informational nutrients of life delivered by it cannot be trusted and we accept them with reluctance even as we must, at some level, accept them.

What hope there is in this model of our informational dilemma comes from those who will not give up trying to organize, out of the cacophony, some bits of the real. So long as this impulse is alive there is always a corner to be turned. Like the creature that collects tiny drops of water, one at a time, from the morning dew in a rainless land, those who have the ability and inclination to organize some more truthful image of our present time must do so to stay mentally alive. As those people spread their efforts and share their methods for making sense of the intentional chaos perhaps, just maybe, a critical mass can demand even more.

1. For comparison, there are 50 to 100 teachers for every journalist. Teaching can be very dangerous in regions of deep social conflict and tyrannical governments, teachers are jailed and killed for their teaching, but the numbers are generally small and certainly far below the proportional rates for journalists. I couldn’t find a source that totaled the numbers of teachers killed or jailed for their professional activities, but a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation gives me numbers perhaps half those for journalists, almost all in the most troubled places. This would make journalism about a hundred times more dangerous given the smaller numbers.

Of course, it is not so simple. All processes and events occur in a context – often called environment.

It is not the goal of our historical time to adapt to the conditions that surround us, but to change them. This is long human practice and the slowly accumulated changes to our environment are the reason that we are in the trouble we are in, but we are now being told that we must adapt to the holey ad hoc structures that make claims of “reality” solely because it is what we are supposed to believe.

There is no reason to ‘believe in’ the accepted structures of our time, like economic growth; no reason to believe in Christianity, private property, Islam, American Exceptionalism, progress or hundreds other things, but there is reason to believe in physical “laws”, evolutionary and adaptive process and scientific method. We believe in “facts” as a matter of convenience; we adopt processes because they work. This is one of the oldest and most well worn paths in the human experience.

Experimentation v. authority has been a tension for the whole of human existence; and experimentation began formally winning with the enlightenment. The assumption (belief) that statements could be true and complete, and the property of those with special powers or superior connections (like with a God), began to weaken as people actually looked, measured and theorized. But humans often continue following the old habit and believing in science ‘fact’ when what we need to believe in is science method.

This is not to say that there should be no inhibiting force to rein in and ‘govern’ experimentation. There should; it is called the scientific method and requires that a consensus of experts (authorities) agree based on repeated experimental results comporting with theoretical foundations. This means that ‘facts’ will always be in a state of change, but that the Method can be usefully relied on to bring those ‘facts’ closer and closer, more adaptively useful, to an ultimately unknowable reality. And even the method itself is subject to adaptive changes as the processes uncover better ways to perform its function.

Designs for behavior may or not comport with the best understandings of the moment supplied by a soundly based adaptive process. We see this all the time: * I am better off eating broccoli, free range eggs (and then just the albumen) and high quality sardines. But I like lasagna, beer, ice cream and pie. * Waste chemicals from my small business damage the environment, but it costs so much to dispose of them properly (if that is even possible) that I dump them secretly. * Increasing population and consumption is clearly endangering the ecological stabilities that support and allow the present ecological structures of the earth, but I am benefiting in this moment from the economic growth that is driven by increasing consumption and can’t imagine life without those benefits.

Belief in ‘facts’ is dangerous, potentially dramatically so. Einstein couldn’t ‘believe in’ quantum mechanics because he didn’t believe that the underlying principle of physical order could be probabilistic, even as the experimental data piled higher and higher. Alan Greenspan believed in economic theories that had been come to by ‘echo chamber’ research and Randian philosophy unfounded in human behavioral studies; he liked them like I like ice cream. And at the greatest and most depressing extreme, Henry Paulson (and now Tim Geithner), pathologically, believed in his own righteousness and self-importance, and so was the front man for an on going monumental theft bringing damage and destruction to millions of people all over the earth.

A deeper belief in the adaptive processes of the scientific method could have led Einstein closer to the truth, could have caused Greenspan to question his certainties and moderate his actions and, perhaps, could have caused Paulson to be diagnosed as dangerously sociopathic before he found his way to the highest eyries of power.

It should be obvious that we are in a terrible situation: billions of people, thousands of ‘fact-based’ belief systems and almost none of them naturally supporting of adaptive process-based systems. Yet, we all must become method-based and not ‘fact’ based; we must all become scientists, adopting process-based belief systems just as we have, over time, all become literate. There was, for a long time, a prejudice against being literate with letters and numbers, just as today being scientifically literate is considered geeky. As long as we continue arguing over beliefs as ‘facts,’ there is no hope for resolution: there are endless years of squabbling over facts. If people have mutual respect for the process, divergence in fact only supplies material for adaptation, not reason to compete for truth as an absolute.

And there is little time, perhaps a generation. I can only guess at the thinking of the economic and political elites, whether they support an enslaved world or an enlightened one, though I have serious doubts that the necessary changes in education and media are high on their agendas. But as helpful as it would be to have the elites fully engaged in the next salutary steps toward a ecologically sustaining future, they are not required if enough of the rest of us are willing to do the necessary work and to take them on when required.

Ralph Nader has recently made the argument, in a work of fiction, that the economic elite can save us – and it is certainly true if they were to seriously devote themselves and their resources to the problems detailed by sound scientific research, that many seemingly intractable problems could be solved, but it is more likely that they will obstruct the changes that are needed since most of the solutions contain the lessening of their power, their wealth and their entitlement. The more amorphous masses will have to lead the way. In this direction lies more suffering, closer brushes with oblivion and other dangers, but it may be the only way.

Becoming evermore depressingly clear is, based on a vast evidence base that the world’s leaders have seemingly chosen not to believe in, that maintaining our present human habits will so damage ecological and biophysical systems that many present ecological structures will collapse with drastic consequences for human social and economic order. A process-based belief system would examine the data, evaluate it on its merits and develop actions corresponding to the greatest weight of the evidence. Focusing on whether the ‘facts’ benefit one political party or another is the sort of madness that comes from belief in propositions over process.

We need to believe in the process of the scientific method,¹ but first we need to be well versed in its functioning. We, a significant part of humanity, must make this process the basis for our actions. The old ways of believing in Men and Gods and their proclamations must give way to adaptive systems of change based on the processes of discovery that have led us so well in our material quests. This is no more than adaptation explicitly within the consciousness domain: we have no more time or space to do it in the old ways; they have brought us far, both in understanding and knowledge… and to the brink of destruction.

Just as reading and writing were once new, suspicious, seen as largely unimportant and seemingly for only a few, yet fueled the greatest changes in human societies; so today the broad epistemological and social designs of science must be poised to be both tool and primary system of belief for any successful future.

1. This has to be an unapologetic sustaining of a method for selecting the most veridical options to be the ‘facts’ with which we inform our actions. A common current model for discord, that of looking for equality in all positions, is silly, fundamentally unscientific and flagrantly non-adaptive.

I am not speaking of simple irrationality; although such strangeness rides irrationality as a surfer might ride a wave. This is beyond irrationality: this is the human capacity trying to work in a design and with “responsibilities” well beyond its powers. We could think of movies where a ‘primitive’ is thrust into the present. We have, small step by small step, made the details of our world in such a way that they integrate into a whole that is beyond our comprehension and our powers of adaptation. We are all ‘Encino Man.’

Economists are struggling to understand and, in some way, control a global process of exchange that has grown to become like the energy economy of a rainforest in which only 5% of the species are even identified much less known in any comprehensive way. These people are very smart and yet, ultimately, they are seen to fall back on ideological prejudgments: the conflicts and dueling pronouncements are really statements of largely unfounded belief. Such situations lead only to the opportunism of personal aggrandizement and gain, and not to rational options for whole communities living more successfully in integration in an ecosystem.

I have long felt this strangeness because of training in the standards of biological integration and adaptation. Actions that remove from the universe thousands of species integrated into adapting ecosystems, remove millions of biochemical systems that have evolved through the same processes, over the same immense time, actions that remove these things without the slightest awareness, are incomprehensible. They are exceedingly strange. But there has been a quantum leap in the presentation of strangeness; it requires no special sensitivity or training for its recognition.

I spend a great deal of time with “children” (14 to 18) who are fighting the strangeness, fighting the upsets and uncertainties of their days. The strangeness has left them without a solid surface to build their lives on.

The transition years have always been difficult – the transition from protected childhood to responsible adult. Our ancestors had a solution to this change: a child observed, as he or she grew into pubescence, the behaviors of adults and at a point, decided by tradition, was initiated into the next stage with ceremonies and specific instruction. After such an initiation the child was then a baby-adult, just as he or she had been, at their beginning, a baby-child. A degree of certainty surrounded these human lives like water surrounds a coral reef.

The children I spend time with, for the most part, are overwhelmed by the strangeness and uncertainty that pervades their every moment. They don’t believe anyone or anything and thus contribute to another layer of strangeness. Adaptation for them is an impermanent process of the moment laid over a desperate desire for stability, safety and a future that they can count on – precisely the qualities of life they are denied. And in a dramatic act of strangeness they come to believe in commercial advertising, celebrity and subculture reality.

That they select these things as a reliable source for reality is not in itself strange at all: a large part of the economic world is devoting considerable energy to create just such a platform from which to communicate, sell to and control these children. What is exceedingly strange is that the so-called adult world has allowed its children to be stolen – Pied Piper fashion – from them. But these children are not secreted away behind a cleft in a rock, but are there in front of us, just beyond our comprehension; a condition, they have been told, that is good for them. Our youth and what they will become, what they will do with the increasingly complex world using their decreasingly effective education, is another strange conundrum. It adds to the sense of weightlessness.

The adults, those grown into full size and needing some job to sustain themselves, are barely adult-like in the sense of competent practitioners of the human way. The strangeness settling over them leaves them angry and frightened; uncertain and grasping for the hand-up offered by religion, militancy or materialism, or by almost anything that will seem to let them see a bit of acceptable future through the strangeness.

The world has grasped for Obama to clear away the uncertainty, the lies, the terrible incomprehensibility; yet this only adds to the strangeness. We want our leaders to make sensible decisions; we want them to make our world safe and understandable. But leaders haven’t done that since we lived in small nomadic communities. Leaders have for thousands of years struggled against the grounding reality; their power only comes from the illusions of their followers. It is this that has finally resulted in whole populations living in ungrounded strangeness. It is left to us to find our way through the strangeness, to find the grounding structures in our lives.

I seem always to find my way back to this place. Either I have little imagination or this is, like the bottom of one of those spiraling coin funnels used for charity donations, the final destination for our efforts. We are turned back on our own resources, and they have to be enough. Ultimately, we must accept that the strangeness is not a condition that we can make sense of and thereby overcome or correct. It is the product of billions of individual actions disconnected from reality coming more and more each day into collision with each other and reality. The consequences seem strange and overwhelming because they are; and they are not to be made sense of. Sense is to be made of our own lives and our daily contact with The Real. The trick is to discover what that is. It is a first step, at least, to know what not to consider.

This essay could go from here in many directions; for example, to the chips and energy drinks that so many, especially the young, abuse themselves with or to the preparations that are used to create eating addictions, but this is about a personal concern suddenly turned timeless and potentially devastating.

Someone dear to me has had continuing depressive symptoms (and I have dabbled in the depression waters for my knowing life). He has tried diet related ameliorators: reducing pesticide in take; getting adequate and balanced amounts of essential amino acids, vitamins and micronutrients; generally recognizing the critical role of intake.

My discussions with him had begun to move more and more often in the pharmacological direction, a “solution” we agreed that was like using a mallet to repair a fine Swiss chronograph. But we had never seriously discussed gluten.

Of course, gluten and celiac disease had come up, but it somehow didn’t seem directly relevant to symptoms of neurotransmitters. However, as I bumped into more and more references to gluten digestion issues, I decided to just stop eating gluten as a self-test before I offered this as a serious option for my son.

I have for many years kept track of my calorie budget and general diet (see first sentence!). When I stopped eating foods containing gluten I replaced (or more than replaced) the calories with other foods (e.g., avocado for bread in some circumstances). And yet, in the first 10 days I lost 7 pounds. Now those who know basic metabolism realize that 7 pounds of fat represents over 25,000 calories and at 2000 calories a day, even if I ate nothing, I would only use up about 6 pounds of fat; ergo, the weight loss was from water, more precisely, edema; and even more precisely, the edema of an inflammatory response to gluten was the most likely reason.

I was amazed. As time passed my energy level increased. Walking up steep hills, especially carrying weight, had become more and more taxing for me over the years; I had given this to my age. But, even 3 weeks into the diet change I noticed a reliable difference. And then I began to notice a change in mood. I would call it an improvement certainly, though more correctly it was a smoothing out.

About a month into gluten-free my car decided to malfunction many miles away from what passes here for civilization; this after I had been walking for some time in the high desert hills. My only choices were to stay overnight or to walk out in the deep dusk and dark. I walked out carrying my camera gear – 2½ hours before a road and a car kindly saved me. But I was fine and fully prepared to walk the next 8 miles to home. This would not have been my condition the month before. My interest was fully piqued.

Gluten: “Wheat gluten was traditionally classified into gliadin and glutenin based upon solubility in aqueous alcohol. Gliadins were thought to be responsible for precipitating coeliac disease; glutenins were thought probably to be nontoxic. More recent classification, according to primary amino acid structure, reveals not only great heterogeneity but also similarities between different gliadin and glutenin proteins. Peptides derived from both groups are immunostimulatory in coeliac disease and it is highly probable that glutenin proteins are therefore toxic. Attempts to breed wheat with satisfactory baking properties tolerated by coeliac patients will be very difficult.” (P. D. Howdle, St James’s University Hospital, Leeds, UK.)

This is a stark statement.

Gluten is a water insoluble protein complex found in the family of the grasses; it seems that its properties are useful in protecting seeds in dry conditions. Thus, unlike many of the plant-made chemicals that are toxic in foods as a form of protection from predation, gluten’s consequences come from the unfamiliarity of the protein to the human digestive system, at least, the unfamiliarity of the Caucasian digestive system.¹ In the most extreme form, celiac disease (US spelling), symptoms are dramatic, though often misdiagnosed. But what interested me were the less intense consequences.

Humans have been eating grass-based foods as a major and continuous part of their diet for only about 8 to 10 thousand years. And even then it is only in very local regions that grains have been primary for that long. Most of the world has only been grain-fed for less than a third of that time. Our digestive system and the enzymes that are its tools have been evolving to a reasonably consistent diet for millions of years. Prior to grains, the great change for our Genus was the addition of meat and animal fat in increasing amounts over the last 2½ to 2 million years. The jump to grains has been dramatic and rapid – far too rapid to allow for digestive processes to adapt fully (or even at all) to new proteins.

The consequence is that gluten can only be partially digested. This is especially true for those with celiac disease. It is now understood that their bodies treat certain of the peptide pieces (break-down products of the partial digestion of a protein) as they would viruses and react by killing their own intestinal lining cells. Some of these peptides get into the blood stream and are attacked at other places in the body resulting in auto-immune disease symptoms.

But what if no one, no human digestive system, can fully cope with gluten? The numbers are interesting: about 1 in 200 Caucasians are said to have celiac symptoms. It has also been suggested that only about one in 50 cases are correctly diagnosed. As I think through the numbers that would mean that about 1 in 4 are actually having some symptoms of gluten digestion insufficiency. And then add in my experience. I have had, in any one moment, no set of symptoms that would point to a ‘condition’ worthy of attention, but looking over my years a number of accepted, and therefore, unexplained concerns fit neatly into a gluten response model. I have been vital all my life, mountain climbing, pulling 3 day study sessions in college, seeming strong and effective. Yet, as I aged into the accepted declines, I discover that most likely I have been running my whole life with a sea anchor deployed.

What would happen to the human condition if the world went off gluten? What if almost everyone is being diminished to some degree by an inflammatory response to a food that they cannot fully digest because the food is too new in our dietary repertoire?

My sons are taking this seriously with what seem, to this point, to be good results, but what about the others that we know about, the 50 undiagnosed (crazy word for being poisoned by your food) for every one who is? And if we find that the consequences are more wide reaching, can we eliminate gluten from our food supply (reducing is not an option, it is all or none in most cases)?

It is obvious that the “gluten interests” would fight this even being considered, would fight accurate information getting to the public. And since gluten carrying grains are now half or more of the world’s food supply and since world agriculture is devoted to these grains, it would also be effectively impossible, even if the world were to accept that gluten was a serious health issue. For the moment then, I will remain on a gluten free diet and suggest to others that they give it a try.

1. No blatant racism here: the research has been done on mostly those of European descent and such subtleties of physiology should not be thoughtlessly generalized. Similar frequencies are suspected in other populations.

If we examine these lists closely, we find internal contradiction, limits of application and other exceptions to strict adherence, but we don’t really understand these devices as absolute anyway, but rather as guides. Even those that have the force of law, like the Bill of Rights, must be adjudicated in specific situations since a few words can do no more than offer direction for a journey, not prescribe its every turn.

It is in this spirit that I offer this list of the Real Seven Deadly Sins. The limits and contradictions may seem especially glaring, but this is only because we are not use to them – and I will deal with some of the exceptions.

The “original” Seven Deadly Sins have a long history, quite a variety of inclusions and have been 5, 7, 10 and more sins at different turns. A society picks its sins; they are adaptive.

We have come to a time when we desperately need a new list. This is not to say that the list that evolved from Dante (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) has become acceptable, although fashion has certainly changed for several; in fact, if we had been more serious about these, we might not be in such a present pickle. But we need to refocus on those activities and, especially, the principles that have morphed from sin to saw.¹

These are the New Sins:

1) Progress
2) Economic growth
3) Property
4) Excess
5) Censorship
6) Repression
7) Religion

One of the first things that you might note from the new list is that it is easily adaptable to collective action, where as the Dante list is more easily seen as the unfortunate qualities of individuals. For this and other reasons, we might best keep those seven available for personal use. The new list is, in some cases, the “originals” writ large.

It is, today, our institutions that are dominating human action, and human institutions are not just the summing up of individual human behavior, but are, under the Consciousness System of Order, developing into new entities with new properties for which new guidance is needed.

1) Progress

This is the most insidious sin and one from which some others receive their motive force. We have come to see this greatest source of devastation as the essential positive value – and we rarely question it; taking the assertion, “It is progress,” as a substantive and often final argument.

Progress is change that arises from some previous condition, change that is judged by some humans as an improvement. But it has come to pass that the only guiding principle for the design of change is a previous condition that formed from some even earlier progress. That this seems perfectly normal to you is a measure of just how insidious this sin is.

Living things “progress” by adapting to the biophysical realities of the living space. Of course, they begin with what they have, but the changes occur in a universal context of long scale forces and processes. In humans, progress has come to mean changes that modify some existing condition arising in the human context, a condition that came to exist with the last round of progress. The speed of adaptation and the power to discover and use specific bits of information about how the biophysical world functions has allowed humans to ‘defeat’ certain biophysical rules. By bringing enough energy to bear and using mechanical physics, heavier than air machines can fly. By concentrating specific chemical species a concentrated consequence can be made to happen: poison, acid, lighter than air balloons, metals, etc. There are millions of examples. These things we call progress.

An evolutionary system would have to integrate every consequence that occurs within evolution’s time frame. Consciousness Order system time frames are so much more rapid than biophysical time frames that we have avoided the consequences of our behaviors. This we call progress.

Progress is building dikes to keep the waters out – both literally and figuratively; and then building buildings behind and on the dikes, and then building more and better pumps to remove the water that seeps through, and then, and then… The reality is that the water level is higher that the land level. Think for a moment on this from a position of sanity.

The sin of progress is to act outside of the context of the biophysical time frame, to make changes in response to existing conditions in such a way that the biophysical costs are deferred to other humans, other species and the future. Our societies today are dependent on billions of jobs that are the products of progress and all but a handful are made from the overcoming of the overcoming. We now have to keep trying to overcome the very fabric of universal reality to continue to ‘make progress.’ Such is the depth of our depravity.

And so Progress is a sin. Rather than seek it, we must make appeal to attempt it; must be able to demonstrate that the proposed changes enhance integration into biophysical reality, not attempt to defeat reality with some slight of hand. We would continue to change, to learn and to use the living and physical worlds, but at a pace to which all living and physical process on earth could adapt; a pace that will not create the dramatic synergies of a convulsive rejection of living things as the consequence of our progress.

2) Economic Growth

The sinfulness of growth is more obvious than the sin of progress. One need only think for a moment of the concept of the exponent. And it needs to be clear that human capacity has created a new model for growth; it is not the same process as growth of biological systems – just the same word. Biological growth is replenishment with the capacity to exceed its bounds, but fully inhibited by homeostatic feedback so that ecosystems are no-growth, sustaining systems.

Economic growth means an increase in the volume and speed of transactions of exchange. Transactions of exchange are the trading of one thing for another. Since there are basically three kinds of things (material/energy, behaviors and abstract tokens of exchange) there are a variety of forms that exchange can take, but ultimately increasing amounts of real stuff must be extracted, moved, modified and consumed as an economy grows. To some extent the need to actually raise crops, dig in mines and cut forests brings perspective to our economic growth, but…

economic growth can occur, so long as participants believe that tokens of exchange represent real things, as a result of trading those tokens – really betting on how many of a particular token will be required to trade for a particular real thing at a particular moment. This allows ‘not real things’ to increase in amount without limit. If the tokens are in a demand relationship with real things, then it is possible for there to be more ‘real stuff’ represented by tokens than there is or ever can be. The result is that demands are made of the earth’s capacities that cannot be met; the reality of the effort and limits of extraction is overcome in the perception. This is a sin.

A component of economic growth is investment: I loan you a hatchet to cut firewood and you return the hatchet plus a bit of cut wood, or I could loan you tokens to trade for a hatchet and you give me back the tokens plus a few extra. Either way you have to cut more wood than you require. The amount of material or behavior traded becomes more and more dependent on the obligation and less and less on the actual state of need. Economic growth mutates into increasing states of obligation.

If there is not a constantly increasing need or obligation, then there can be no more than momentary or situational occasions for investment. And so – placing the cart squarely in front of the horse – our economic system sustains the investment model without regard to the relationship of human economics to the natural biophysical economy. This is a sin.

3) Property

Property once seemed so simple; I learned it at my father’s knee: It is mine, you may not use it or touch it without my permission. I hold it by a force as close to a divine right as such things get. And yet, my ball (hat, toy or _____ ) could be taken and tossed around and eventually tossed onto a roof in the age old game of ‘humble the property owner’, AKA ‘keep away.’

I have discovered that humans come with a great variety of respect for property. Some have arm’s length rules and others will take even useless things. Different groups of people define property in different ways – what can be property, degrees of holding property, what must be done to identify property.

“Keep away” offered this instruction: property and force are intimately related. Property is mine so long as I am willing and capable to use sufficient force to keep it. A powerful man in my town lived at the end of a long road; the sign at his gate, “If you trespass, you will be shot.” This was not at his front door – his house could not be seen – but was at the most easily approached edge of the 30 or 40 acre mountain valley to which he lay claim. Records show that his family drove out the previous inhabitants with legal trickery and one punctuating dynamite explosion.

There are 3 ways that we can view property: 1) that which is, 2) that which is ours (or theirs) and 3) that which is mine (or his or hers).

“That which is” belongs to all and to no one. You may use it only as long as you don’t change it or deny its use to any other organism or process. “That which is ours” belongs to the commons, the community decides potential uses and what compensations and ablutions are required. “That which is mine” belongs to me; again, however, the community decides what can be personal property and often the limits of control and use – this should tell us something. The attempt to turn ‘that which is mine’ into absolute domination without regard to the rest of existence is a sin.

It is circumstance and excess that moves the sustaining to the sinful. Human progress and economic growth have driven property from balanced patterns of use, compensation and replenishment to the assumption of more and more private ownership; so that today we claim we can not only own the contents of our pockets and immediate living space, but we can own the land, the water, the air, living things, DNA, chemical processes and ideas. And we have even added a specialized instrument of private ownership called the corporate collective to own in even greater amounts and with greater force. This is sin.

4) Excess and Wealth

Excess has almost always been a sin in almost every culture. Yet, in our present condition the application of Sins 5 and 6 (censorship and repression) have led the way in justifying excess, usually claiming envy as the reason of objecting to wealth. This is quite simply sin supporting sin.

Excess is a sin because it perpetuates the sins of property, is the product of growth and can only be justified by dishonest and coercive means. But, primarily it is a sin because it damages the human relationship to the planet and to each other.

Ultimately the excess of wealth (both private and societal) can only be extracted from the universal commons and it can only be extracted by the coercion of one human entity by another. It is difficult to say who is harmed more in the existential sense, the miner who must dig or starve, yet retains some vestige of specieshood or the owner who believes in the madness of his right of power to steal the life and labor of the miner and the product of the land. It is, of course, not difficult to see who lives in the greatest distress of the moment.

5) Censorship

It is obvious to many that we must not speak of dangerous, harmful and distressing things. To do so would bring upset and disruption to our settled lives: speak the Devil’s words and call the Devil.

There is, as there always is, a major difficulty: How are we, or who is, to decide? We are ultimately faced with this simple choice: freedom of speech with only the most limited restrictions or speech controlled by whoever can wrest power over its methods and topics.

Control of speech is control of idea, is control of possibility. And yet we cannot live in a world without design, a world that limits and organizes possibility. The probability of glucose moving through a cell membrane in controlled by insulin, which is controlled by a dozen other conditions of the organism. We can expect nothing less for a super-organism collective like human societies. But there the analogy fails; the process by which biological evolution designs physiological function leaves out nothing. Every force and movement of the natural world gets its say without inhibition because it is exists in the total reality. Again, we can have nothing less for our collective social order.

Lying is a special form of censorship that denies access to a factual basis for action, but lying should be no more reviled than demanding that the truth of another’s understanding not be spoken.

This is an especially dangerous sin as new and powerful forms of human super-organism are demanding and receiving the power to censor speech that challenges their domination by controlling the means of speech and using that means to control the topics of speech.

6) Repression

The rejection of one identifiable racial, ethnic, language, cultural or behavioral group by another is one of the oldest human actions. When there was space and available niches, this was less sin and more signal to spread the species around. It even served certain other useful functions by reducing the spread of disease and supplying gene pools from which vigorous crosses could test the genetic waters.²

But today and for some many hundreds of years the repression of one group by another as been in the service of quite other forces: economic and political power. Billions of human lives have been lived out in the greatest of distress – truly painful, brutal and short because of the sin of repression.

Life has never had a guarantee – or so is my belief – but to assign beforehand that billions of lives will be lived in horror and pain is a sin. And this is a sin that is likely to continue to increase dramatically as it has over the last few thousand years. Never have so many lived such deprived and devastated lives as in today’s moment.

Two hundred years ago there were one billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in deep poverty at the advancing edge of European expansion and industrialization and in islands of industrial servitude. One hundred years ago there where two billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in the deepest poverty as the first world nations were converting the rest of the world into their larder. Today there are almost 7 billion, nearly half of whom live at the edge of survival. Local sustaining practices have been so damaged and demonized that even those who are not in immediate peril today are but one global economic decision away from dust.

7) Religious Piety

Religion is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Its supporting structures and designs are deep in our origins, but it has become a chimera, a crossing with politics, economics and the institutional super-organism. Religion is a developmentally dysfunctional entity demanding the privilege of an infant while having the strength of a powerful adult.

In its origin religion was the combined effect of the Stories that integrated human action within the environment and the instinctual emotional connections to environment and community. It gave strength to the adaptations that formed the basis of human success. It did not create the behaviors, but responded to them as the collected Stories that organized the behavior of a group, carrying them through space and time.

Devotion to religious story has become the central madness of our time and one of the greatest inhibitions to our survival. There were in the past many thousands of religions because there were thousands of situations in which people lived. Since religion’s function is to define a way of life, then it must be completely connected to immediate and sustaining reality – it used to be! Now religions are devoted to the remains of Stories that once had some relational meaning, but are no longer connected to reality. This makes the Stories of religion easy prey for any entity to use as devices of censorship and repression.

Summary

These are the sins that we need to “hold in our hearts” as unacceptable. These are the sins that are devastating our world. 30 years ago drunk driving was a laughing matter (even as people were killed), but became a matter of scorn and rejection as people incorporated into their habits of thought, into their lists of sins, driving drunk. We need to see these seven sins in the same way. Just as with the original seven deadly sins a small number of people are empowered by them if allowed, but if enough people reject those behaviors, actively reject them, they will be weakened and more of us may begin to see them for what they are.

1. It is an irony of our time that those who claim to champion individual freedom are really speaking for the institutional collective and the individual’s subservience to it, while those who are accused of socialist “collectivism” see the collective in service of the individual.
2. Cultural habits combining with instinctual behaviors associated with incest created complex rules that often involved either males or females moving from one group to another.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs may have begun as a classification of the internal motives of human action and the order in which they dominate our experience of life, but they have become a ‘selling’ list for the entrepreneur. A most basic biological tenet is that an organism is to be in primary control of the behaviors, environments and situations that meet its essential needs; that is to say, it is to be well adapted to its environment. A basic tenet of the entrepreneur is that no human need should be able to be met by the simple and direct action of the person; a way is to be found to intrude into the space between need and the behaviors or the material for the need’s satisfaction and to extract some amount of the energy in the transaction. And that is to say, a defining quality (as I have drawn it here) of the entrepreneur is very similar to the biological definition of parasitism.

In today’s human environment people do not directly meet their own needs, they purchase the terms of need satisfaction with abstract tokens that are intended as representations of energy or work. Such tokens only have power when a large enough number in a population honor that representation. And here is the tricky part: once people, structurally, have no means to meet their own needs by their direct action, then they must have a design or device that will move others to meet those needs. The consequence of this ‘reality’ is that ad hoc systems of exchange have transmogrified into economic structures. This is understandable, but what is not clear is why humans would see such tertiary, quaternary, etc. designs as primary… with magical properties.

Actually, it is not so mysterious; once we came to depend on these Rube Goldberg systems for the movement, storage and protection of abstract tokens of exchange, imbuing them with magical powers was a very human thing to do. This leads, ultimately, to a conflict of global proportion. The primary biological directive: ‘stay in direct control of need meeting behaviors and situations’ is challenged by the economic realities of an overpopulated and abstracted world where no need can be met without tokens of exchange; need-meeting opportunities all now have tollbooths.

We are at a place where the loss of faith in this Madness can destroy millions of lives, human and non-human. If we stop and wonder at the efficacy of existing money systems, if we even ask that they be examined or re-examined against biophysical models of reality, there is a great cry of foul, the threat of “economic failure” and even physical force. Also, those most vulnerable to perturbations in the system are actually harmed by the very suggestion of concern.

This is not to say that we are discouraged from giving attention to economics; it is understood that the designs of exchange can be a compelling study. How the tokens of exchange are given stable trade-able value, how items and behaviors are given value based on the stabilized token values or where and how these tokens move or are be stored and by whom, these are all questions that generate real, complex and fascinating options. But when such processes are seen as essentially immutable and more important than life itself, then a high level of insanity, strutting as authority, is doomed for a fall.

In our present situation this thinking leads to powerful contradictions: people are consuming less, which is a good thing for the biophysical reality. If this were to become habit and expectation, we just might be able to begin letting the planet heal itself, slow the loss of biodiversity, restructure human-environment relationships and just maybe begin to discover how to act in recognition of our outsized powers as change agents. Everyone would discover how to do with less, much less, that we do with now.

But… people are consuming less, so ways must be found to get people to consume more because the designs of the economic system require that consumption increase over time. If consumption slows, then the movement of the tokens of exchange slow and the designs that stabilize the value of the tokens and that assign token values for items and behaviors are perturbed. Trust is lost in the tokens and the whole structure becomes endangered. Since the only way to deliver essential needs is by the efficient functioning of the economic system, millions will suffer from even the slightest doubt or concern about its efficacy.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is nuts.

No one is of the opinion that humans can increase in number and use of earthly resources forever. It is clear, even to crazy people, that a bucket can be filled and then can hold no more. Sensible humans recognize that we have been for sometime now trying to overfill our place on the planet. This is bad news and most people do not like bad news, but then again most people prefer bad news to worse news.

Sensible people must continue to hammer away with the ‘bad news’ that material possession is a drug delivered by a pusher economy, and that devoting time to avoiding the ‘tollbooths’ is more species verifying than working for the tokens to pay at them (I don’t think it bad news at all, since a simple life has proven for me to be far more fulfilling and purpose filled than the “economic” life).

We will only be able to change the present total domination of almost every detail of our lives by an exchange token economy by being able to meet the most essential of our needs by our own efforts: that is the bad news. And it is also good news since there is nothing more rewarding than to be in real control of even a short life compared to being the disenfranchised observer of a life owned by an economic system.

I was fortunate, near the beginning of my journeys, to be instructed on this distinction: Do not ask if this person or that group might do an action; rather, ask if the action is done at all and how commonly, then take that as the basis for your answers to the particular. I think that we would have to agree that humans have regularly killed off other humans, both indirectly and directly, who stood in the way of attaining or maintaining a preferred life style.

Of course, that something can, or is even likely to, happen does not make it a certainty – especially when there are many other options. I would only point out that the horror of an action has seldom been an inhibition for very long. Other factors, such as efficacy and possibility, tend to dominate our choices.

My intention in making the argument is to excite an increased and refocused observation of events. If the tools for such a mass murder are made available, then the condition of possibility is met. If the totality of our situation is hopeless, then so is the condition of efficacy.

As a species, with the capacity to project events into the unknown future and thus change the future from the grubby confines of the present, we are not fixed in our trajectory; this is one of the great lessons of the Consciousness System of Order. It is a bit like the silly rhyme: ‘I shot an arrow into the air. It fell to earth, I know not where.’ But, if we have some knowledge of the lay of the land, we can have, at least, some idea about where our arrows might land and their possible consequences.

One of the paths into the mid-century and beyond would have all humans living with a primary concession to the biophysical reality of personal biological need: every person would supply, by their own hand, some significant part of their personal needs. Such a standard could, with yet another ‘invisible hand’ determine population goals, energy use levels and, to some extent, environmental impact levels. The intellectual support for this possibility is largely lacking in our present moment. There are bits in the kinder parts of major religions. Various philosophers have for thousands of years spoken to the value in living in close contact with the land – this is such a common part of human thought that it has become cliché. It is cliché because it is so simply and completely true.

The diametrically opposed possibility is something with which humanity has more recent experience: an elite parasitizing a slave-based economy (wage-slave based economy serves the same function and only modifies some of the technicalities of economic design). We have the “intellectual” arguments around this possibility, from Locke, Hume, Marx, Rand, Hayek, Galbraith and many others, and only arguments of this form are allowed to be considered for our present troubles. The organization and manipulation of power in a Mad world structure where all things increase at increasing rates and Reality is denied as a founding principle cannot sustain, but can produce a great amount of bizarre, conflicting opinion.

Ultimately, it is a question of whether the great depth of our Madness will carry us into a final conflict with biophysical reality – a madman flaying at imaginary demons while being tormented by a disinterested reality to which he is blind – or will we come again into the wind and the rain, into the seasons, cycles and other realities of earthly existence?

My sensible reason answers that the Madness will dominate the final days of this iteration of my species, that over the next 30 to 80 years we will cling to the most misguided and defeating self-referenced notions of reality until a tormented and enraged environment indiscriminately smites the living world – and we will still behave badly even in the ruins of our world.

But my capacity of imagination and wonder believes, in the way that the consciousness order designs impossible ‘possibilities,’ that we can come to see the madness and demand its retreat; the way that smokers now have to hide next to the dumpster in the back of the building. We will no longer hear that we respect wealth and see its virtues, but that we respect the real “self-sufficiency” of community life, and not the pathological individualism of the sociopath. We will no longer praise as progress the life denying objects that separate us from the work of directly sustaining, and therefore participating in and truly understanding, our lives. We will no longer raise to adulation those who are willing to do the most harm to all things, but condemn their actions and require that they be part of the sanity of sustaining their own existence with their own efforts. We will no longer accept a machinery of societal, economic and political control that claims superiority of idea, power and personal omniscience, but see such claims as self-servingly insane.

Just as it is “impossible” to comprehend how billions of people could be intentionally killed to sustain the present Madness, it is impossible to see how we might come to see the Madness with increasing clarity; and in seeing it find and act on ways to reject it. But ultimately we will end up doing one or the other.

(This is last in a series of four essays that that look at the forms of the choices that face us as we look toward this new century.)

As I read the thoughtful concerns of my fellow humans, concerns about the world situation, political and economic events impacting the people around me and the arguments for what we need to do to make the world and its immediate contacts with individual lives deliver a “better product,” I am amazed and cruelly amused (only in the way an old human can be amused) that there is so little interest in the substrate upon which these events and processes are played out.

There is a biological principle of great importance: “The easiest way is the best way.” The thoughtful will immediately recognize that two important ideas are left undefined in this formulation (and this is ultimately of considerable importance), but the essential concept comes through loud and clear.¹ If given the choice to ride or walk humans typically pick riding. If given the choice of having ample high quality food delivered or going into the jungle and hunting a widely distributed meal, orangutans hang out at the feeding station. Almost all living things function on a simple imperative: get as many calories as possible with as little effort as possible. There are of course rules; there are always rules!

One of the rules is that calories are the natural stand-in for a nutritionally complete diet. In the native world of evolved relationships it is virtually impossible to consume adequate calories without also consuming abundant vitamins, minerals and essential amino acids. This fact is the reason that vitamins and essential amino acids are “required” in the first place – because they were ubiquitous in the native diet and did not ever have to be made by the organism’s physiology.² Not only do organisms adapt to use what they need from the environment, the physiology adapts to what is coming into the organism from the environment. This is a vital principle and an important basis of my argument.

Living things evolve to maximize convenience. We don’t normally see it this way since, by our standards, living in the “wild” is a very inconvenient – all hunting and gathering the little bits of food, water and material that just make life possible at all. Convenience is, of course, a human concept – evolutionary physiology is simply measuring efficiency against possibility – but it is useful to frame the ideas this way. Convenience is a narrow idea that we easily understand as short-term ease; and that is exactly the issue.

To make sense of these distinctions it necessary to present a theoretical construct of my invention: that the world can be seen as three systems of order based on the designs of information collection, storage and implementation. These are the Physical System of Order (foundational fundamental order), Living System of Order (DNA/protein information nexus) and the Consciousness System of Order (Complex informational nexus based on the various adapting forms of Story). The manifestation of a system of order is in the probabilities that it generates. A star has a high probability in the Physical Order, but a bacterium has a positive, but vanishingly small, probability. A mouse has a high probability in the Living Order, but a car has a vanishingly small probability. A spear or a rocket ship have high probabilities in the Consciousness order; we are so new at this system of order that its limits aren’t clear.

What makes this construction important is that statements about one system of order may or may not have the same meaning or value in another, e.g., convenience in the Living Order is not at all the same as convenience in the Consciousness Order (and has no meaning at all in the Physical Order). For example, an orangutan is adapted to a widely dispersed food supply; its whole physiology, structure, social order, and, dare I say it, its happiness. Only the CSO or traumatic accident can deliver convenience in the form of a concentrated food supply as an immediate (and non-evolutionary) change and then make it disappear just as quickly. What is convenient in the LSO is rates of change to which the organism can respond both genetically and behaviorally – this evolves the greatest degree of “ease.” Convenience in the CSO is often measured in a single instance without regard to longer term efficiencies. In the orangutan example, the animals act as though evolutionary process were still functioning, but they have been brought into the design order of the CSO for a time when co-existing with humans. All this can do is disrupt the LSO design order.

In the simplest terms, the meaning that I take from this thinking is that we have acted on ourselves consistently over many thousands of years replacing Living Order convenience with Consciousness Order convenience driven by the principle of “the easiest way.” This is a clash of primary systems of order and not just a mess that humans are making.

Our answer for orangutans, when we understood that we were making a dependent class of great apes unsuited to live the life to which they were evolved was to, as reasonably as possible, “inconvenience” them back into the jungle to the natural life of native foods and evolved habits.³

The tyranny of convenience in our lives is the orang problem multiplied a billion times. There is almost no one left to teach us who we are. There is almost no convenience that we have not so thoroughly incorporate into our daily lives that doing without is incomprehensible – and for which we will rationalize the greatest suffering by other humans and other species in the history of life on the earth.

This is the context within which Gaza is occurring, and Iraq, and the squabbles in Ukraine, and China’s ascendance and the incarceration of Leonard Peltier, and a million other major and minor consequences of Consciousness Order manifesting without the forming basis of the Living Order.

Today we can eat 10 thousand calories a day and not get sufficient vitamins; we can travel hundreds of miles and get a mere moment of exercise; we can tell ourselves (or be told) any lie and have no living or physical reality challenge it. Our pursuit of biological convenience spread into the use of the Consciousness Order’s powers to seek and create capacities of ease and effortlessness that deny us our basic humanity, even hiding from us any options for their rediscovery.

At least for now it may be time to reject convenience with as much thoughtlessness as we have accepted it in the past until some can find a reasonable balance and be available to help others as they recognize the hopelessness of an effortless life. The changes that we desire for the world can only begin with what we are willing to do in our own lives.

1. I first heard this formulation from the lips of an old (to me at the time) black man who had decided I was to be his student in the planting of orange trees when I was working as a farmhand in central Florida in the central last century. We walked all morning stooped to the ground where, inconveniently, the little trees were to reside. After lunch we repeated the morning with the exception that the sun seemed to grow in power every few minutes until the mind, oppressed by the heat, lost clarity beyond the task immediately before it – and then sometimes even the task began to fade into a hot yellow haze. The old man would in the afternoon begin a sing-song as he moved down the long rows: “Da easiest way, da bess way. Da easiest way, da bess way.” He explained that the ‘best way’ was premised on the little trees growing successfully; as many as possible. His meaning was that every movement was to count, that the most trees were to be planted successfully with the least effort.
2. Humans have all the precursor chemicals to make the simple organic molecule, vitamin C, but we don’t have one of the four enzymes that are required. The primate/hominid diet (and that of a few other animals) had abundant ascorbic acid so that metabolic pathway was lost. The typical simian diet has more than 10 times the MDR for ‘C’ and so a monkey can starve to death and never get too little ascorbic acid. Plants have metabolic pathways to make every vitamin, amino acid, fat, complex carbohydrate, nucleic acid and other complex organic molecules, all from simple sugar that they make from “air,” water and sunlight.
3. This sort of situation as led and allowed the highly over convenienced elites to argue that the most challenged poor should not be shown any mercy. Its most true meaning is, however, that anyone who would sit on a fortune of food and not use it to reduce suffering is a criminal. It was in the human habit to distribute largesse among the group. It was the human habit to compensate the environment for its services. This is what has been lost.

It is said that all politics is local. True enough, but actually: All politics is personal. My father has chosen to live – it is his personal statement. The society supports his decision to stay alive – to stay alive at all costs, literally. But he will not live. His death surrounds him like the muggy Florida air; no matter what way he turns it is immediately before him.

I am surprised that I am not surprised at the deterioration, better, the destruction, of the last five years. I will not do the details, suffice to say that the enemies of life when denied a quick kill tend to become vengeful. But it is not the sadness of my father’s physical experience or the progress of his various diseases that are my major interest, though the attempt to avoid and delay the inevitable is part of it.

Driving from Hattiesburg to Gulfport on US49 a sense of deep incredulity and species’ wonder began to fill me. How could we lay ourselves – our products, our process – over the land with such arrogance? The ground reshaped, beaten hard and covered with suffocating asphalt; plants torn from the ground and discarded; dozens of dead, this and that clump of fur or shell or scale, litter the roadside. And all of this, a 100 yards wide for 60 miles, over a thousand little hills and valleys. Of course, it was not just this stretch of road, four thousand miles of road would roll out under me on this trip, but this road was so clearly cut through my native land; an ugly scar painted in imitation of the beauty that had been vanquished.

How could we do this? Ridiculously, this question sat before me as a real source of wonderment for about 40 minutes of the drive; until fog, the outskirts of Gulfport and a big black Harley with a big rider dressed in black against the white fog send me off into the details of capturing that image. But it came back again and again; and as I looked at the old man on the couch beside me – the remaining 115 pounds of him stretched out on a six foot frame – I saw him laying over the land like the road, enduring the moment and destroying the future.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the old man. And I also once “loved” that road, the way it undulates up and down like driving over a rolling ocean; it is also one of the most beautiful roads in America, wide boulevard with great trees, wide median and mowed margins. ‘We’ decided that it was more important to get to the gulf from Hattiesburg in an hour than it was to preserve the land and the millions of lives (and we don’t even see the lives lost as lives at all). It is more important for my father to use vast resources and live on into the nearer regions of death than it is to feed the beginnings of new human life.

These thoughts navigated my mind with some embarrassment as I cruised down the extravagance of I-75 until I landed out its exalted heights on to Sun City: a world made for people in ‘transition.’ For a country boy like me such a place is almost unbelievable. Even more so since I grew up not 5 miles from here; a time when there were only sand-track roads, lemon groves and bare-foot country boys to modulate the free movement of rattlesnakes, alligators and Florida panthers. Today, miles and miles of little houses surround vast shopping areas, all bric-a-brac and gaudy pretense.

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that this is not it. Not only has this city, laid over the land of my youth, destroyed a river and thousands of acres of perfectly good scrub country, it is perpetuating a monstrous lie.

Watching my father, the elements of ‘living well’ become, if not transparent, then at least less opaque. There is nothing that he can buy that matters anymore. Nothing! The pills around which much of his remaining life revolves relieve some anxiety, but bring no joy. It mattered when I ‘took his side’ in a minor dispute with Mom about how to place a chair that he was trying to sit in: “Just leave him alone. He knows how it needs to be for him to feel safe.” (How very odd to talk about my father in the third person in front of him as though he were a child.) And it mattered when I sat beside him and took his old hands in mine and told him that I was happy to be with him and that it had been too long since I was.

It matters, in a negative way, that his children live in other states and other states of mind, that his grandchildren are in China and New Mexico. It matters that the love and human contact that he craved all his life, that is worth living for, will not let him die in peace and in its embrace.

Much of what is done in the name of “education” today militates against the above assertions. As a demographic in the USA, young humans do not learn to read with proficiency. They do not learn to do numbers with proficiency. They do not learn to think and problem solve with reason and logic. They don’t internalize feelings of success and accomplishment with the process of learning new things. A selected (both societally selected and self-selected) group do acquire these skills and behaviors, but not enough for the comfort of the nation or the safety of the species.¹

A few great and orderly minds, and thousands of confused ones, have bent their efforts to this system of wheels. And rather than discovering solutions, the confusions and inefficiencies have increased. This is a data point.

The young people – almost every one – both accept as vital for their future the need of schooling and reject, at varying levels, the doing of schooling. We, the society, have come to see this abominable consequence as natural: kids will be kids will be lids. This is a data point.

The herding together of great numbers of children, organizing them into adult led groups of 20 to 30 and variously entertaining and alarming them for 5 to 7 hours most weekdays in the non-summer months has become one of the largest businesses in the world. The primary activity consumes nearly half of state budgets and some small percentage of the federal budget. There are, in the USA, a little over 50 million children in public school and nearly 10 million in private school. At about $11,000 per child that is a yearly cost of almost 700 billion dollars (2007 numbers). And this does not consider all suppliers of educational services or other related activities from personal school supplies, band instruments to cheerleader movies. This is a data point.

It is universally accepted that young humans need to be skilled in a variety of arts to get along successfully in the world. It is also generally agreed that the complexities of day’s behaviors and employments require specialists to hold on to, advance and impart to others these skills. This is a data point.

No one knows for sure what people actually need to know now or will need to know as the world changes more and more rapidly, other than that people will need to make better and better informed decisions and be able to learn new things quickly as the slack in our world is taken up by our numbers, the environmental damage we have caused and the dramatic changes that are going to be forced on how we do economies. At a time when we, collectively, need to be more and more biophysically correct in our actions, our capacity to communicate those needs seem more and more limited by the acquired skills of the people. This is a data point.

There are two decisions that we, as a society, must make immediately: 1) Is the economy and politics in the service of the people or are the people in service of the economy (and subservient to a tiny minority of economically and politically powerful humans)? And, 2) are young humans to learn to be fully effective human beings or are they to be animate tools of production and consumption? I am not offering these questions rhetorically. There are great forces gathered and prepared to fight for their answers. There are other questions, but they are largely created arguments designed to hide agendas, for example, the religion vs. science flap is cover for the dumbing down of the multitude as well as a pretext for cutting funding.

If we imagine these forces pulling on the daily practice of education like the center marker on the tug-of-war rope over what has become a mud pit, you get a bit of the feel of what is like to be a teacher. Those who teach have almost uniformly agreed on several of the above issues (young humans as individually valuable; the usefulness of high levels of language, mathematical and historical literacy; the value of rational logical problem solving skills and the goal of personal power and independence of thought). It is these very agreements that put much of the education community at odds with other powerful societal forces that, while they seldom are so blunt, see the multitude as economic fodder and a waste of money to educate beyond a certain level of mechanical functionality; even see general education as a danger to their privilege.

It is this tug-of-war that is a major source of education’s troubles – along with other issues. How to do education to meet teacher’s goals is reasonably clear in the research, and has been since the beginning of public schools: small classes in small schools staffed with enthusiastic knowledgeable teachers who have genuine respect for life and caring for the young of our species. This pretty much describes the situation in the best private schools. There is no tug-of-war here. Everyone values the students and respects their need for all forms of literacy and capacity growth.

The money side of public education could be solved with another 100 billion dollars. That amount of money could add about a million teachers (about a 20% increase) and increase the salaries of most of the rest to levels that would attract people who would like to teach but simply cannot afford to (and certainly there should be serious restructuring to make education less of a cash cow for the unscrupulous). The new teachers would reduce class size and increase variety. The educational environment would be immediately better and could begin incremental improvement toward meeting the teacher’s goals.

When I was in business, and I suspect this is true for every CATO Institute libertarian who would shut down public education, if offered the choice between a tool that cost 7 thousand dollars that only half meet my needs and one that cost 8 thousand dollars that met my needs, I bought the more expensive tool. I was never wrong in such a choice and several times wrong when I made the other.

We cannot do America as originally envisioned and as a continuing experiment in popular democracy without an educated population. Private education for all, like private health care, is a sophistry from an economic minority that has become insane in their privilege and whose vision of America is as a fascist oligarchy. They would seemingly deny the very thing that has allowed them to become wealthy in the first place – the capacity of the multitude to act responsibly and economically in the world.

If the class war that is being waged against education were to end, then education could and would have to clean its own house. Pinned down and sniped at from many directions, teachers, as do others in this situation, tend to turn on each other. A thousand plans, projects, paradigms and plagues compete with the attacks of right wingers and left wingers and non-wingers for the educator’s time, attention and courage. I will give but one example that occurred a few days ago.²

A well-meaning “professional development” person took our beyond valuable time to train us on how “star” teachers teach. This a doubly maddening and demeaning for professionals who are working 60 or more hours a week with lesson plans, lesson research, classroom maintenance, grading, individual student consultation, grading some more, reporting grades in various required formats, contacting parents – and classroom contact time – and who have only 3 hours a week in which to meet together as a group to plan, support, commiserate and attempt to create a functioning school community.

Leaping off the page of “my reading” were these words embedded in a soup of educationese: “They think in words of ordinary language.” They being “star” teachers! I wondered aloud: why, if it is ordinary language that we are to use, is it that we don’t simply and ordinarily refer to ‘good’ teachers. But this has become a world where the word ‘problem’ is replaced with a ‘delta’ (used in science expressions to indicate change) and the word ’should’ shouldn’t be used. The rest of the readings were of the rhetorical sort: this is bad, don’t do it; this is good, do it. (We were supposed to make a drawing to illustrate our reading.) But even there a self-protective ideological purity was foisted off as didactic perfection. Behavioral psychology bad; Vygotsky good. This sort of wisdom followed by an anti-intellectualism that was supposed to pass for knowledge of psychological processes.

Teachers should be more than casually informed of the best understandings of psychological research and they should use that understanding in their work, but not in isolation. We have become so afraid of criticism that we can’t even criticize ourselves and have to hide our discomfort in silly games called professional development. I would never have tried these kinds of things with employees. The expectations were that the work was done and the truth was told. If I messed up I needed to know right then. There were clients and there were deadlines; there were working machines and broken machines; there were no deltas.

That is the part of business (not big business, but every small struggling business) that I would bring to teaching: telling everyone the truth before it gets any age on it. Working together and trusting the other person. Creating a sense of ownership of both the product and the institution. The things that every truly successful small business person knows how to do. I could hire someone to keep the books and keep the calendar, but it was an important part of my job to make an honest image of the possible a real and worthwhile thing to the people who worked with me.

Bring on Vygotsky and bring on Skinner and learn from them both. Say the things you mean and don’t mince words. Education in America needs to be a socialist institution supported by everyone to the extent necessary to produce powerful, independent minded people who know a lot and can use that knowledge (and it is self-serving bull shit to say that public education can’t do that). If we are spending 700 billion now and it is not enough, then spending less is simple madness. If a thousand billion is the right amount, then spend it. This is one place where the return is always significantly greater than the investment. But the investment is for everyone by everyone, and cannot easily be secreted away as the spoils of “royal privilege.”

What we do with and for our young is the true measure of our beliefs, and will be the true cause of our success or failure as a nation and as a species. There are those who claim that the USA is the most advanced nation on the earth; if that is so, then we should be treating all of our young humans better than any other nation by preparing them for a human and sustaining future as a clear demonstration of our superior values.

1. The CIA World Fact Book reports 99% literacy for the US, but that is a measure of the lowest possible level of literacy. Other compilations of data suggest 80% literacy as a more illuminating measure and that many more people are limited in their life choices by not being able to accurately decode and use information from reading and numbers. It is very likely that half of adults are materially impacted. I have yet to find a data based speculation on the percentages that we should accept as reasonable.
2. 2) Since retiring from business I returned to teaching in a small public high school. For over half the students, English is a second language. I have seldom been in the company of such bright and charming human beings or ones so thoroughly confused as to their prospects and needs for the future.

It is an obvious strategy: if you are only 3 to 5% of the people and you have competing interests, then doing whatever it takes to get a 51% measurement of the vote is clearly a primary route to political power. When the 3 to 5% have an outsized percentage of the wealth, they 1) can hire enough voices in all the right places to appear of outsized importance, 2) can convince themselves of their own importance and 3) can let the “especially worthy” into their ranks of privilege as reward and a way of encouraging a public view of accessibility.

What is not clear, and intentionally so, is that everything – everything – done to advance the cause of the 3 to 5% among the majority has to be a lie. I am using the rather archaic conception of “lie” as the communication of something that is known to be false in its direct content or its effect. Our language has been so manipulated by the hired agents of this minority that “lie” requires that you admit that you have intentionally made self-serving and untrue statements (and even this is not called a lie, but rather an apology). Anything short of this is called a misstatement, a greater truth or blamed on some version of the Devil.

Winning and losing is different for a group comprising only 5% of the population, but who must appear to represent 50% to be listened to. Compare: if a true majority is being represented, then losing a vote means that those that you represent have rejected your ideas. If you comprise only 5% of the population and your candidate or initiative is rejected, it means that you did not present your option in a way that would attract enough votes (or didn’t steal enough): you know that it is not the wishes and the needs of the 5% that have been rejected, since they were never presented, but the packaging designed to bring together 51% didn’t work. The values and interests of the 5% are never presented or questioned; what matters is not truth, but how to get into an office or initiatives on the books that support those interests.

This means that there is no symmetry between the Democratic and the Republican parties. In the simplest view, the Democratic party purports to represent the majority lifestyle and interests; the Republican party actually does represent the lifestyle and interests of the economic elite. There should be no electoral contest ever! The 5% position, if openly and honestly stated, would lose every time. But openness and honesty are not the currency of political communication.

All of this (and I mean ‘all of this’) is difficult to talk about since the language has been, if not controlled, greatly influenced by a way of relating to material and service exchange in a completely insane way. The accumulation of excess has historically gone from a socially frowned on habit that raised doubts about a person’s ‘goodness’ (Neolithic societies); to an activity allowed to Gods and demigods, but not to regular folk (early “civilization”); to making the 10:1 threshold of excess as acceptable, but much beyond that questionable socially and of questionable utility (spread of mercantile classes); to everyone should get as much as they can and to do so is not only a right, but good for the economy and the world. In fact, the inhibition of acquisitiveness is now the suspect position (a version of today’s utter Madness). In such an environment, the possibility of a reasoned, responsible discussion of these issues beyond a narrow number is difficult. Imagine trying to discuss Revolutionary War history in a room of crazy people all of whom believe themselves to be either George Washington or King George!

As long as the insanity of the wealth addicted and the special forms of social pathology that have come to underpin the economic elite and politically powerful are the models for social and economic behavior, the 3 to 5% will attract a following. This following will try to emulate this mad minority’s easily observable, often manufactured, qualities. In a rational world (one at least somewhat founded in biophysical reality) these behaviors would be a category in the DSM and have some treatment paradigm, but not be the standard for proper human action.

Of course, the Democratic party doesn’t represent majority lifestyles and interests, though it has the responsibility of seeming to, and could be made to if there were ways to communicate and coordinate the mutual concerns of the multitude. Worker’s organizations of all kinds are the best source for such coordination and are thus the first to be attacked by the mad minorities minions.

The reward structure is clear. Hannity, Limbaugh, M. Reagan, Liddy, O’Reilly, Gibson, Ingraham, Malkin, Beck, Hewitt, Buchanan and many more have tailored a presentation, content and style, to the message of the mad minority. While some may actually believe some of what they present, it is more likely that most are moved by success and economic motives, motives easily in the control of the mad minority.

Even in so small a part of the world as I inhabit, I feel the pressure to certain phrases, certain positions, certain arguments that I understand will excite the interest of those who can decide if my efforts are acceptable — it goes far beyond the quality of the writing. I can only guess at the pressures on those who aspire to aspects of the madness in the first place. The pressure to suck-up and not to fuck-up must be huge especially as the “communicator” finds their way into the very heart of the wealth and propaganda machine.

The capacity to control the measures of success and social acceptability has come more and more into the hands of the 3 to 5 % mad minority. The consolidations of media/entertainment companies have let the many hours a day of media contact be designed by more and more centralized sets of goals. There are thousands of films, TV shows and stories that glorify consumption — even a presentation that attempts not to has to sell itself in consumption terms and language.

And yet! The vast majority of people, the real species still with some intimations of sanity, realize that there is something terribly wrong. Unless the 3 to 5% mad minority maintain a full court press the incipient sanity of the multitude always threatens to break through. Such sanity, of course, has no place to go in the present world, and so quickly loses its power like a single wave washing impotently up a beach. We see this in the election of Obama. He was elected against the limitations of prejudice, and being an unknown, by the hope of the multitude for some sanity in their lives. But he was also supported by many of the 3 to 5% and will be swept away by them unless the great thirst for sanity begins a movement.

We live in a vast and complex ecology of these forces, many levels of idea and action mediated by all the forms of human motive, capacity and madness, but the multitude is still potentially the human animal, grounded in their daily biology and natural sanity. We must begin to use those capacities first to save our personal selves and then possibly more beyond ourselves. The mad minority will lead the earth’s people to ruin as they attempt to save themselves from the ecological and economic disasters of their design. It is not populism to see hope in the multitude, it is simply that they are the only source of sanity left.

The productive capacity of the planet, available for human use, is the limit of wealth. And this is dependent on a variety of factors that give practical limits well below theoretical limits. First and foremost, the productive capacity available to humans must consider in its calculation the capacity required to maintain environmental stability and to sustainably provide ecological “free services.” This does not mean that humans can pick and choose among the world’s ecosystems those that we really need and trash the rest. That would be a fundamental misunderstanding of biophysical reality; and the way we have been doing business for more than 5 thousand years. We are at present, by the most conservative estimates, using the earth’s productive capacity at about 50% above a sustainable level, i.e., to maintain our present use rate would require about 1.5 earths. To remove the most dramatic poverty, experienced by almost 1/2 the earth’s people, would require at least 2 earths if there was no major wealth redistribution and using present economic models. The average life style in the USA requires about 5 earths, in Europe about 3 earths.

A more realistic accounting would suggest that we are using the earth well beyond these levels. The Ecological Footprint model developed by Mathis Wackernagel et al. had to be very conservative to be listened to and respected at all. We are in an economic and political frame that trivializes environmental science and especially “tree hugging” ecologists. Partly as a result of this the Footprint model does not calculate nearly enough capacity for maintaining biospheric integrity. Further more, the Ecological Footprint calculations are not considering the future demand of arbitrary wealth creation and the effect of expectation on human actions in the environment. If “we” have accumulated 100 trillion dollars worth of abstract value, “we” will be dissatisfied with a planet that can only return 10 trillion in goods and services. A likely result would be an “every man for themselves” scramble to get as much as possible as fast as possible: actually what we are doing now. (Pricing “mechanisms” and inflation would ‘adjust’ the values, but if a consistent standard is applied the difficulty remains clear rather than obscured.)

Economists have wanted to be physicists of ‘value mechanics’ when they should be aspiring to be ecologists of human/environment energy exchange. Everything is connected to everything else; if you tweak here, there can be a ripple or an explosion there. The “law of unintended consequences” is misnamed. It is really the Law of Consequences: actions beget a spreading web of consequences only one (or a few) of which we perform the action to attain in the first place. Organic systems modify their relationships to bring all elements into dynamic balance or the system disappears and is replaced in its region or function by other systems that meet that goal.

Biological systems are homeostatic.¹ Human systems are biological systems. When human systems were primarily mediated by genetic and protein based action, the homeostatic regulatory mechanisms were already in place through the arbitration of the living state. As Consciousness Order designs began to replace Living Order structures the direct connections to the homeostatic designs weakened. This should not be taken to mean that the regulatory homeostatic systems were no longer important, just that the Consciousness Order found ways to defeat them for short-term advantage. A simple example: naked humans would have patterns of movement in the environment that support maintaining body temperature. The whole ecosystem will have accommodated the human pattern. When humans are able, using the tools of the consciousness adaptation, to kill a bear and wear its fur, new patterns begin to occur in such rapid succession that the ecosystem can ‘never’ catch up and humans are “free” of the immediate consequences, until the ecology reacts with massive effects.

As long as humans were not especially abundant the disruptions to ecosystems were local, but now that we are global all of our activities must be calculated into our relationship with the biosphere. And the accumulation of arbitrary wealth and the expectation that the earth will deliver on that “promise” has become the greatest danger that we face as a species since we will apparently use all of our technological tools to attempt to enforce that promise.

Homeostasis delayed is not homeostasis denied: ecological systems will come into balance. Humans have defeated these Living Order and Physical Order based systems with our rapid footwork up to now — at terrible cost to the many local ecologies and increasingly to the biosphere — but ultimately homeostatic mechanisms of the interrelating species will have to harmonize. The final “adaptive” response is to go extinct and thus deny service to the ecology resulting in a cascade of extinctions that produce a much simpler, balanced ecology, but one that very likely will not provide the same “free services” to humans.

Our financial world seems almost completely disconnected from the biophysical world. We almost never put the two in the same news report. We don’t speak of them with the same language. The digestion of a wood rat has no clear connection to the job loss at a General Motors plant; an upside down mortgage doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the migration of monarch butterflies. But that is not because they aren’t related. It is just that it is not in our habit to understand and recognize the relationships. More is the pity.

The production of greenhouse gases is a contributing factor to climate change. The American southwest is warming and drying. A wood bore beetle is encouraged by the warm and the dry and whole forests of piñon trees have been killed. Piñon nuts in the millions of tons are missing from the food web of the woodlands. Wood rats are starving as GM fails because of overproduction of low MPG cars and trucks. Even if you don’t care about this, it is none-the-less a real relationship among millions of others, all of which will eventually find their way into our digestion.

The human Consciousness System of Order adaptation allowed the accumulation of excess in our dealings with environmental energy exchange. That excess has been stored as wealth. Wealth creates entitlement. Stored wealth appears to grow without limit, and thus entitlement becomes apparently unlimited in a limited world. This is the absolute opposite of the homeostatic limiting that is the very basis of living things.

What is completely clear is that humans are but one of 10 million or so species integrated into the biospheric order, one species that is acting out a new and powerful adaptation, and with not a clue as to that adaptation’s power, properties and dangers. It is completely clear that the adaptive interactive structures of the Living Order will absorb the human growth bubble into a re-integrated biophysical order. What is not clear is whether the consciousness order will remain or what form it will take if it does remain. It is not clear whether the consciousness order can be marshaled by our species and made to apply its great powers realistically to our dilemmas and not just offer the ancient palliatives of mysticism. And it is not clear just when the cascade of massive ecological events will begin in earnest, but they have certainly begun.

The present troubles in the financial system are ultimately sourced in these larger troubles. They will only be delayed and exacerbated by restoring the growth habits to which we have become accustom. The sooner our academic elites understand the ecological realities of our economics, the sooner that political decisions are made about which we value more, life or abstract accumulations of wealth, then the sooner we can get on with taking the actions we will need to take to adapt back into the biophysical order that we have been fighting to dominate and exceed beyond for much too long.

1. Homeostasis: We all know this word. But the concept is deep to the very center of life and life’s functioning in the biosphere. Living things require constancy in literally thousands of reactions and chemical concentrations, but chemical reactions tend to begin and go to completion, like setting a sheet of paper on fire. Homeostasis is a way of remaining “constant” by regulating reactions: when going too slow a secondary reaction is triggered that speeds things up, when going too fast a different secondary reaction is triggered that slows things down. The result is that vital physiological processes function within the ranges that allow life to continue. This is a model that we might attempt to more generally apply to our relationships, including especially our financial behavior, in the living space of the biosphere. The model of a fire, finally, has a quite draconian result.

He is absolutely the new face of elite power: American power and beyond American power. It could be no other way. No one can get to the medium and upper reaches of global power and not be accepted by and acceptable to the world’s elite. While not monotonal, the elite does tend, like any interest group, to common harmonies.

It is not difficult to know the goals of the world’s most powerful and influential people: they wish to remain powerful and in control of their world (which in this case is The World). What doesn’t help them in these pursuits is either seen as a danger or as of no interest. A major difference between the elite and the rest of humanity is that they are able to actually do what they imagine. Mr. Obama is now a member.

The rest of the world’s people imagine more with hope than with action, hope ranging from studied possibility to desperation (thus, the power of ‘hope’ as a political word). We want to continue the life we have and to have a little more. Obama knows that world well. This is the great appeal of Mr. Obama, a man with the melodies of the multitudes supposedly still in his ear; now one of the leaders with the apparent power to write the music, a ’stealth’ leader carrying the cacophony of the crowd.

But it is inconceivable that the major planned movements of humanity will not originate in the desires, expectations and adaptations of the elites. If we understand this reality, then we can find some voice even when we have none. If we understand nothing else, we must know that Obama is no longer of the many, but he will remember for a time the power of the many when they act in unison.

Much of the power of the multitude is in the unplanned movements of events and the degree to which the elite require the ordinary folk to support them in uncertainty. It is in this that Obama will, to some extent, have to chose sides: Will he use his depth of understanding to include the voices of the people in the adaptations of the elite or will he use that understanding to defeat those voices? To be a great leader is ultimately not in answering the call of the multitude, but in getting the elite to realize the importance of including some of the needs of the multitude in the elite’s expectations.

If we ask the right questions, we will get the right answers. Not, will Obama be co-opted by power? But, are people commonly co-opted by power? Not, will Obama remember his roots even in the face of great pressure? But, do people generally remember the experiences that form them? Not, will Obama act with disregard for others to support his personal and family self-interest? But…? You get the idea.

I believe that the ball in now in our court. (Please excuse the shift of metaphor; I could have said that we have counted out the ‘rest’ of the last 8 years and we have now been cued to our next part in the score.) When I sort through the answers to the above questions a most likely image forms: A new president with a willingness to listen to well presented argument and responsive to pressure from all sources. The most powerful and forming sources will be from the elites that have vetted him and found him acceptable, but he will not forget that when he was of the multitude he could get things done. The last administration had no such understanding and thus the depth of their failure in all things, except the flagrant and obvious support of the elite; like the obvious and embarrassing sycophancy of a fool.

The multitude never has an agenda and so is easily ignored, and difficult to please. This is the moment when an agenda is desperately needed. The much maligned intellectual community must listen to each other and get serious. We cannot complain that “the administration” doesn’t do the right thing unless, first we, and then, they know what the right thing is. The president and his advisors are not there to do the right thing, but to figure out the details of doing the right thing they are told to do.

As I wrote in a different and more passionate context: “(W)e need the counselors of caution to be resurgent by a force of will, driven from a desire to survive, driven to rise up from the backwaters, from the insane asylums, from the dusty library stacks and in an increasingly harmonious voice singing out, ‘enough is enough’ — the classic tautology of unacceptable surplus — singing out with the narcotic voice of the Sirens, ‘we are changing ourselves to death; we are growing the world to death; we cannot kill off the world and remain ourselves.’”

I think that there is some reasonable chance that an Obama administration will listen to the multitude for a time, even as it does the bidding of the elite. Simple randomness would suggest that every now and again someone will come to power who can realize, if only momentarily, the greater press of global biophysical reality. If enough of us are loud enough, are consistent enough and in tune enough, then there is a chance that this new administration will respond…for a time.

I heard a ’screaming lobster’ metaphor the other day, but by then it is too late.

We, as a nation and as a species, are facing very real and daunting concerns.

We have heard nothing of the coming end of economic growth as both model and reality for the distribution of resources. Clearly the changes that we have seen over the last 20 years presage that end. The accumulations of wealth and political control, while always a powerful motive, are also well-designed preparation against the time when the world simply cannot support the ecological burden of the human billions. It is clear that humans will increase in total numbers for only a few more years, but what is not at all clear is how that change will manifest in economic design.

The present economy is actually a very simple thing: there must be more of everything everyday. We see this simple dictum in the stock market, in the company balance sheet, in our expectations for our paychecks. When I was actively in business my company had to grow 10, 20, 30 percent per year – and all my clients had to grow at those rates or they went out of business. I compared the previous year’s January with the current year’s January as a measure of business success and personal worth. The idea that the numbers should be the same or less as a goal was incomprehensible

Some things are so damned simple! And that’s what makes them so damned complicated. A metabolic system burns organic fuels in the presence of oxygen. If such a system is uninhibited in its growth it will burn organic fuels until they are all gone, or until they are effectively gone and the growth of the system has to stop. It depends on your role in this simplicity how you might feel about it: if you are the fuel or are damaged by the heat of the fire, then you would be thankful when the growth of the conflagration is ended. But, if you are the fire, if you are the system that has been growing and spreading without inhibition, then the end of growth is a catastrophe without precedent.

Most economists cannot even begin to think about this – it’s like a doctor talking to the Church of the First Born about a 7 year old with appendicitis. I think it is because they do not understand Reality – the economists or the doctors. Some enlightened economists, Herman Daly for example, have been trying this problem, but acceptable solutions are elusive. His ’steady state’ economy and growth of quality but not quantity run into some of those nastily simple complications: whom do we throw out of the boat as we do the process of bringing it to balance? Because, frankly someone will have to go!

So, the end of our present growth based economy and the need for a new design that supports the world’s billions as we gently and responsibly (?) reduce our numbers over the next 50 to 100 years to about, a sustainable, 1 billion has not been addressed by the presidential campaigns. At least, I didn’t hear it. Will these things be accomplished by democratic process and appropriation of the vast stores of private wealth, by fascist totalitarianism or by neglectful failures of economies and ecologies? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Related to this omission is the failure to honestly present the ecological realities within which our various daily entertainments occur. There are newspaper articles and TV mentions of ‘global warming’ and those irresponsible disaster “documentaries” on the History Channel (sic), but these are more like litter on the street than an honest presentation of reality: “Sure, trash is real, but someone will pick it up if it blows in their yard.” The reality is that human activity on the earth must be rapidly and markedly reduced. Courageous political leadership will be required for this happen without corresponding devastation of human communities (and nations) cut off from new paradigms; like the Bates Motel was cut off from the Interstate.

Our present resource wars, for that is what they are, are but the beginning of whole new designs of conflict as we struggle to control our sources of oil, chocolate, aluminum, concrete, food, water and lebensraum. The wealthy will have to do with less and the marginal will have to do with none at all; but neither will accept this verdict willingly. An economic justification for one human living on one dollar a day and another living on a million dollars a day pales to insignificance if a million of those one-dollar-a-day people ask the question loudly enough. I didn’t hear this discussed in the debates.

Neither did I hear discussed, by these want-to-be national leaders, the deep distrust of the electoral system. All honest people of whatever political view have come to believe that the vote is compromised by the manipulation of electronic voting devices, dishonest registration procedures and a variety of dirty tricks. Only a true ‘landslide’ election would be believed to be a representation of the public will. If essentially half the nation rejects the legitimacy of its “elected” leaders and acts to delegitimize that government, then two things will happen: the government will be weakened for any actions requiring general acceptance and the government will isolate and insulate itself from the public. Both of these are deeply destructive of constitutional democracy. It quite frankly doesn’t matter whether the greater danger is voter suppression, electronic manipulation or registration bias; the integrity of the vote must be the primary concern.

Large numbers of the people of this nation will tune out if the election is close, believing that they are powerless to have their voices heard. Others will aggressively reject the “winner.” The nation will not long survive such disinterest and internal dissent. Just look at the damage done by the insular Bush Co. to our national self-trust and our standing in the world.

The truth has been largely missing from these proceedings, but it is the true and the real that ultimately rises up to demand action. Wish as we will, what we are ready to deal with is often not what arrives as requiring our response. There are these and more overwhelming issues lying in wait for us all as we step out of our doors on Nov. 5. It would be good to have people in government with at least some clue that they exist. To answer the title question: I expect very little and, as is the expression in my family, that is a cryin’ shame.

There is a very basic question that we do not often ask, but that is essential to our relationship to each other and to the flow of life on this earth – big picture stuff, with personal consequences. Where does what you use and accumulate come from? That you buy ’stuff’ with the money that you earn is not enough of an answer!

If your child came home today with a pocket full of candy, you might ask where it came from. If he came home with a new very expensive bike, the question would certainly arise. In these situations, we have a reasonably clear view. The child has an understandable “personal worth” of charm, persuasion, group affiliation and some money. Friends share candy wealth. New bicycles are sometimes loaned, but if the child consistently accumulates more stuff than you can account for, you will attempt to discover the source. That is the goal here. You and I “possess” accumulations of things; where does it all come from?

Let’s examine something simple; the wooden stool next to my desk. I exchanged money for it years ago (the larger meaning of money can’t be considered here). The furniture store exchanged money for it from a shop where people were given money to cut, shape and assemble the wood pieces. The wood was bought from a sawmill. The trees came from a forest.

But, the forest was not compensated for the tree. The people driven out by the cutting, who once lived in the forest, were not compensated. The animals and the plants killed or driven out by the cutting were not compensated. Neither was the soil or the animals, plants and bacteria of the soil.

In other words, if honestly examined, the layers of compensated transactions cannot disguise the fact that at base we take what we have. Humans exert the energy, possess the ability and operate the behaviors to take the material, inorganic and organic, from the earth’s surface, water and atmosphere. This taking is not compensated, i.e., we do not systematically give back something useful in reasonable corresponding amounts to the soil, to the river, to the forest, to the ocean, or to the atmosphere as compensation for what we take.

We only compensate when the material is held in some protected condition, and we compensate not so much on the basis of value of the material, but on the force of the protection. We only compensate with a full recognition of value when the force of protection is equal to our power to acquire.

If you child answered, “Oh, there was this little crippled girl with a whole lot of candy, so I just took what I wanted. Its OK though, she couldn’t chase me and didn’t have any weapon to stop me,” how would you respond? 99.99% of parents would be extremely troubled and many would immediately and directly condemn such behavior as absolutely wrong.

But these same parents will eat bananas or drink coffee grown on land that just a few years ago was taken by guns and fire from the people who lived there. These same parents will accumulate twice, ten times, a hundred or a thousand times as much material wealth as is needed to allow them to be safe and comfortable (considering such accumulation a duty, a right and point of pride), letting the fact of several steps of exchange disguise that all that they have was taken from somewhere without compensation.

We all in essence hire (worse than hire–demand, often on penalty of death, that they perform this work) a ‘goon squad’ to do the taking. And we then are satisfied and righteous because the last transaction up the chain of transactions is civil, orderly and compensated. Ultimately, we despise those who are driven to be close to the taking, the miner, the farm laborer, the lumberjack, the mercenary solder, as tainted and unfit for association with those who have purified the theft with multiple compensated transactions of the increasingly powerful.

How would you feel if you child answered, “I gave this kid $50.00 for the bike ($2000.00 full suspension model). He took it from in front of a store where he found it unlocked.” If he said, “I paid $150.00 for the bike at a second hand store. They bought it for $50.00 from a kid who took it from in front of a store.” Would you feel better? Would you feel better still as more distance of transaction is lain on and as each layer of power (knowledge of the “true” value) is compensated? “I gave $100.00 to a friend for a quarter share in whatever he bought. He paid $400.00 for the bike to someone who paid $150.00 for it at a second hand store. They bought it for $50.00 from a kid who stole it.” Would you recognize that you were supporting the uncompensated taking no matter where you were in the string of transactions? Would you speculate on a relationship between a market for the bike and forces that push someone to take the bike in the first place?

While talking about these things with a ten year-old child, she said, “But you can’t pay a tree.” This was the distortion inculcated. She imagined a dollar bill left on the stump and correctly recognized the silliness. But, payment is based on satisfaction of need. You will not do for me if I do not give to you what you recognize as meeting a need, and I must comply because you hold either your action or material in a protected condition. The tree’s wood, the ore in the ground, a chemical or the power in water are not protected, there is only a degree of difficulty involved in taking them. Overcoming the difficulty is not compensation. If it were, then those who have to travel far to buy food would get it for less!

“You can’t pay a tree.” But trees have needs: water, certain qualities of soil, light, atmosphere, temperature range, wind, certain insects, birds and other animals, certain bacteria and molds in the soil, certain association with other plants, and more (to be left alone!). While less clear, ore bodies or oil pockets and the surrounding substance have the need to be undisturbed in order to remain as they are, part of the physical process of the earth’s crust; and, perhaps more persuasive to a pragmatic human, remaining as they are does not release heavy metals, silts and other extraction wastes into streams or onto the surface.

The essential need of anything is to remain in a sustaining condition in its ecosystem or physical cycle. Specific needs are all adaptively structural into this overall need. Protection from harm meets needs in this paradigm just as well as supplying some metabolically vital substance.

Every successful (long lasting) organism adapts to meet its own direct needs and to function as part of the sustaining structure of its ecosystem. It does this through direct adaptations and adaptations that modulate and inhibit its own primary need meeting behaviors from upsetting the balanced sustaining structure of that ecosystem.

This last is exactly what humans have not done. Humans are at the beginning and untried stages of their very unusual–unique—adaptation; the speed of application, power and range of effectiveness of the human adaptation combined with certain of its present defects (primarily the nature and role of illusion), may limit the chances of humans surviving long enough to adapt fully to their environment by bringing the power of their adaptations under evolutionary and ecological control.

Taking without even the recognition of the need for compensation is just one of the difficulties for humans and distorts all subsequent economic relationships. A second distorting reality occurs when compensation is based on the power of the protection over holdings rather than on value. A consequence of these distortions is the drive to incredible excesses of accumulation rather than supporting the goal of using as little material as possible to have as full a life experience as possible – a manifestation of this is the confusing of the quality of life with the amounts of our accumulations.

What we do is take whatever is unprotected, invent ways to protect what we have brought into our sway, and invent ways of defeating the protections of the other chap. All of this fidgeting about for advantage vis-a-vis other humans leads to a complete disregard for any non-human source that we might take from.

The process of compensating and protecting complicates and complicates, eventually becoming economics and politics. And creating power, creating explanations and justifications for our actions and creating the systems of ordering principles like how interest rates relate to unemployment rates and the complications of the money supply. Such explanations all serve to distract attention from concrete evolutionary realities, and are used to render such arguments as these presented here as foolish when, in fact, these arguments are the essence of our continuing life on earth.

It must be understood that human biological success is not a positive function of our present definition of economic success, but rather is the opposite. Economic growth, technological development and increasing per capita wealth are the sure representations of a species out of control. Spreading and increasing taking is modeled not on the behaviors of the large carnivores (representing 500 million years of evolutionary history and millions of potential examples), or the behavior of any complex creature. It is modeled by a wild fire that burns all the available fuel until, nothing left to burn, it extinguishes. If this is to be the major result of human evolution, the fire could be the very fire of life on earth, and the fuel could be the bulk of life sustaining substance and opportunity.

No organism can base its existence on increasing rates of uncompensated taking from fixed amounts of material and energy. What humans have been successful at doing so far is forcing the consequences of their taking onto other creatures, weaker cultures, yet unborn humans, and into distorted relationships with each other and the environment. Seen with any clarity of perspective, it is clear that this can only go on for so long. We can only refine, patch and postpone the effects of this style of relationship with the environment to a point, beyond which we will quite simply be unable to keep up with the total ecosystem distortions and failures.

There is a very strong tendency to reject this sort of thinking for a variety of not especially sound reasons: “It is not positive. It is doom and gloom.” “There seems to be no way to respond effectively to this argument and still keep 3 cars and stock in tobacco, nuclear weapons and East Indies hardwoods.” “This can’t be right since we would have to live differently, and if it is right, it’s too hard.” “This can’t be right because there is no way out if it is right.” These all share an essential reason for rejection — “We don’t like the consequences.”

Well,… As my children might say, “No duh.” If a situation presents you with only undesirable consequences, then you had better pick the options that offer the greatest chance of coming to a new position with some desirable consequences, even if the initial effort is the more difficult.

It is to the immediate benefit of those who profit from the present patterns of material excess to deny that there is any problem or that we as a species are by our excesses contributing to our own destruction and immeasurable harm to balance and order in the biosphere. No powerful media source is going to say, “Don’t buy my stuff because its production harms the environment. Our workers are exploited. You don’t need it for any sound reason. And finally, it does not even do what we imply it does anyway.” Even though these might be the more true of all the things that could be said about a product.

When the goal is to get as much stuff as you can – the insatiable desire for goods and services talked about in economics – from a limited world of finite resources, a distortion of perception devalues all ideas but those that support the goal. If the goal is to use as little as possible in the most efficient way so to live as fulfilled a life as possible, all ideas and experiences become valuable. Experiences, understandings and feelings about and from self, others and the world become the essential ingredients of life. We understand from this perspective that whatever we have we get by taking and that we have a responsibility to find an effective means of appropriately compensating that taking. For every other organism this is solved in the evolution of their various instinctual behaviors, and it was for humans part of our development when we lived within the order of the environment. We are no longer ordered by the environment in which we evolved and so now must make such valuing and compensating a part of a cultural ethic if we are to regain our balance and leave an inhabitable world for our children and grand children.

Another argument against these views is to say that it is fine to take without compensation what is not owned. This opens the thorny issue of what it is to own a thing. In the view presented here it only means that the thing is in a protected condition (by force or threat of harm; finally based on the willingness to inflict greater harm than a potential taker is willing to endure in the attempt to take).

The view here is that nothing is owned. No one has some abstract right to the control of anything. Humans have expanded the “right of place” — an organism brings under its protection a certain amount of space around its own body or around its group — to include anything definable as property. In doing this we usually get it exactly backwards claiming we have the right to protect something because it is owned by us, when in fact it is “owned” by us only as a function of our holding it in a protected condition (with threat of teeth and claw, knife or gun, moral condemnation or law). But strangely, what we “own” is not “protected” from abuse, damage, misuse or destruction by its “owner”; only protected from being assumed and consumed by another creature.

This is clearly the truth of things. It is only necessary to see what happens to desirable material when the actual protections are weakened or removed in social disruptions; the facts of ownership go in direct proportion to the failures and rearrangements of the power to protect.

Material or land that is not protected from taking or is in a condition of protection that is very weak compared to the power that is brought to taking is taken without thought of compensation because “it is not owned.” It is then “owned” by the taker and may be used in any way that the “owner” wishes, again without compensation.

We have seen this function from human slavery, to animal ownership, to land ownership, to portable personal property. An “owner” could sell or kill a slave, beat an animal, monoculture farm crops, burn rather than give away clothing, all as full and “protected rights” of ownership, and with complete disregard for compensating the “thing owned,” and complete disregard for any other that might have an interest in the “thing owned” (that is, be in some ecological relationship with the “thing”; soil systems and strip mines, indigenous peoples and rain forest removal, or broadcast pesticide/herbicide effects).

Ownership is then one of those illusions that distorts and misguides human relationships with other humans, objects, creatures and territories in their ecosystem. Humans have finally assumed that they own the whole biosphere and can do with it as they please, when in fact humans are but a part of the biosphere and depend for survival along with every thing else on its unmolested continuance.

The failure to have instincts that guide behaviors toward a symbiosis with the ecosystems in which we live, and the failure to develop thoughtful behaviors to the same purpose upon recognition of the inborn deficiency, may will be the ultimate failure of our adaptation. We might simply take without compensation or respect until the sources work their final and greatest power, to be used up and gone from the earth forever (or even gone or unusable for a few days or months, if immediately vital for life, would be equally devastating).

So the answer to the original question: We take what we have, because we can, from the finite supplies of the biosphere as does every other organism alive today or that has ever been in the nearly 4 billion years that life has existed on this earth. However, every organism on earth other than present humans compensate for their taking by returning to the biosphere, in appropriate amounts and forms, what is required to maintain the balance of life sustaining physical and organic processes. If this were not the case, life would not presently exist on earth.

That humans take without compensation is not a clever or “slick” move, i.e., the way that humans function in their economic exchanges is a serious distortion of the systems of compensation that have evolved as ecosystems – interwoven symbiotic exchanges of material and energy through interpenetrating physical and organic cycles.

The evolutionary rule is to take what is needed and to give back what is needed. Every organism must take (space, minerals, water, organic materials from the dead or the living, energy). Every organism changes the space in which it lives by its presence. But every organism must take and modify place in such a way that there will be material to take tomorrow and all tomorrows to come; the processes that replenish must be supported and not overwhelmed.

I don’t know how to make this point with the authority that is needed; it is the most important understanding in the world for humans: no species can take without compensating. The evolution of organisms within ecosystems is the structuring of mutual interpenetrating balanced exchanges.

If humans continue to apply their adaptive powers, without major modifications toward truly compensated taking of material and energy, they will do such terrible damage to the physical and biological cycles supporting life in the biosphere that there will be a cascade of extinctions of millions of species.

This could mean that Humans in the present subspecies form (the scientific name is an appellation I cannot in good conscience apply. We are many powerful things, but wise is not one of them) lasted a little over 100,000 years, not even a good wink in geological time. If the last 3 billion years, from the beginning of simple but reasonably abundant life on earth, were condensed in time and played as a two hour movie, humans like us would occupy about 1/4 of a second of film time (7 frames) and then we would, along with millions of other species, disappear.

My best guess, however, is that humans will not become extinct. Such an event would require an almost unimaginable set of devastating conditions — the very fabric of the biosphere would have to be seriously torn to kill the cockroaches, rats, humans and other broadly adapted and adaptable creatures. For the most tenacious species to be extinguished, the very atmosphere would have to be unusable for some extended period of time, all the water poisoned or some other primary conditions of life totally disrupted.

But should we, and it is likely that we will, continue on in our present fashion, changes will be precipitated beyond which it makes no sense to try and see, other than to suggest that, at least for a time, taking will again be compensated and humans will have “returned” all that they have taken in a great convulsive act of repossession.

All this together puts people who recognize and understand it in a very difficult position. The natural evolutionary goal of any species is to function in a sustaining relationship with its environment. In personal terms for humans this means using as little material and energy as possible to attain as vital, dynamic and spiritually full life as possible. The consequences of this goal are balanced environmental relationships—the natural flow of life and death, speciation and extinction, adaptation and innovation in physiology, anatomy and behavior for 10’s, 100’s, 1000’s, 1000000’s and even billions of years.

However the social, political and economic dynamic of our time supports, encourages and demands that people use as much material and energy as they can and accumulate in a protected form as much (of everything) as possible (this is a basic tenant of economic theory). These behaviors are what society approves of and values. Not accepting and performing these behaviors is considered subversive, lazy and stupid (if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich!).

Both are realities. To be “successful” and accepted in the society, a person must consume excessively. To be true to our humanness and to meet the goal of being part of a sustaining ecosystem we must consume only what we need and must actively find ways to compensate all takings. The excessive consumption and its collection of supporting values has a clear end consequence for those who will see, no less than the damage of life sustaining processes of the biosphere and the violent readjustment of life to the dramatic physical changes (not just human life, but all life: virus to mammals). We would leave a legacy not of wealth and power for our children, but a legacy of contamination, disease and the violent convulsions of population reduction, economic disruption and political failure – if they were lucky.

The consequence of using only what we need — consuming very much less of everything would have immediate consequences nearly as economically devastating as an economic collapse (it would be an economic collapse, but could be in part controlled), but if thoughtfully engaged, disease and contamination could be minimized, and the convulsions of population reduction and political failures also minimized.

It is, however, unlikely that humans will consume less so long as they can consume more. It is unlikely that humans will see the consequences of their actions and mitigate against them when they can take now and leave the full price of compensation for their children to pay later. So the dilemma is how to live in an excessively consuming society seemingly insulated from recognition of its most likely future?

The question is: Do you consume to excess and contribute a tiny fraction to the problem that will not be solved anyway, appear “normal” and live with the recognition of the potential to be more fully human, yet not make the effort to be so? Or do you consume at the level of needs, reduce the tiny fraction of your personal contribution to the overwhelming assault on ecosystems, live to increase your humanness, but in the process be undervalued and even condemned by significant parts of your society; be judged crazy, lazy and irresponsible (such a terrible thing to be called irresponsible when acting in the only possible responsible way).

This is the simple reality of the choice. All that depends on it is everything. It is impossible to act in a benign way.

There is an invisible hand guiding the physical world to all the forms and processes of our “world.” It is the in the laws that control the rates, that set the proportional relations of the various forces. But this fundamental reality is only metaphor for other “invisible hands” in evolution, social relations or economics. Appeal to invisible hands in these situations are no more than the failure to illuminate the designs of process.

The appeal of capitalism exists largely in its making acceptable the concentration of wealth and in its religion-like faith in a common, generally negative human attribute as a positive guiding principle: human greed. Capitalism is a social and economic design that gives great freedom to the most greedy. Greed and wealth concentration are intellectually supported under the argument that the invisible hand of greed will design the best possible distribution of wealth based on the most efficient use of resources. And it denies that humans have the power, or should have the power, to control wealth and resources.

This ‘leave it to the market’ argument overtly suggests that we should not trust other people to control the process of wealth distribution while hiding the fact that the very most acquisitive and ruthless of us are doing exactly that under the cover of ‘the market.’ Trillions of dollars of wealth have been taken by the tax and credit system over the last 8 years (and for many years before) and “redistributed” to the economic elite, a polite term for the greedy sociopaths at the core of these economic actions. This is being done primarily with war, the healthcare (sic) system and the credit system.

The “bailout” of Wall Street is not a bailout at all. Embezzling is slow. To get big bucks in a hurry requires a robbery and a robbery requires the hold-up note. All the planning can be done in secret, but with a robbery there comes the moment when intentions must be made clear: “Fill this bag. I have a gun in my pocket.” We have just been through such a moment, with the note written in all capitalism, so most people missed its true meaning.

“Fill this bag. If you don’t your lives will be ruined and children’s lives will be ruined.” In capitalism the note reads: “The Market has been damaged by excessive attempts of foolish people to regulate it and so trillions of dollars must be given to the managers who are guided by the True Invisible Hand to save us from a great depression, social unrest and civil war.”

What this boils down to is that capitalism, as an economic process, seeks to remove the rules that guide economic behavior, and as economic capitalism melds into political capitalism, what ever form of governance was in place is replaced with fascism. This has been the major movement of historical process in competition with democratization. Global corporations have championed democracy as a way to gain deep power in government, to take control of taxation, reduce political restraints from popular autocrats and manipulate political process.

Capitalism restrained by democratic socialism, capitalism used as resource distributing economic device and not as a religion is a functional design. But it is a little like having a gorilla guarding your house; he might at any moment realize his power to take over the whole place.

This is what has happened and, I fear, that we will see the full effect of capitalism without rules for the next many years. It will look a lot like other times in history when the powerful separate from and dominate the great middle by reducing them to servitude. Only this time we are facing an ecological end of track. How the elite will handle this reality as it manifests more and more clearly will, I suspect, not be pretty.

Economics is about those processes and designs that distribute resources. It is also about the accumulation of, movement of and motivations created by value added in exchange. And it is also about the protecting and the unprotecting of any resource or accumulation.

Economics has a natural history comprising 3 major stages: (1) distributing the personal excess from hunting and gathering among family/group members, fully commingled with the natural economy of an ecosystem; (2) exchanging locally abundant resources among related, extended groups on a break-even model; (3) trading “valuable” resources among potential enemies on an a trade-advantage model.

The first maximizes the benefits of a resource, strengthens group ties and increases the health and wealth of the whole group. The second makes available to a coalition of family groups the benefits of a larger region and creates ties of mutuality among larger groups of people covering larger geographic regions. The third makes trading a substitute activity to taking, creates the abstract notion of value added and creates new forms of relationship among human groups that because of distance and difference would be potential enemies, i.e., competitors at the margins of their physical and cultural territories. It is based on a balance between the power to protect ‘our’ wealth and the power to unprotect the wealth of others. Our present economic models, from communism to capitalism, are all forms of this last; capitalism is just taking economic steroids.

Human biology and consciousness order have properties that give design to how we do everything, and so give properties to our economic behavior. The functions of mathematical economics are attempts to describe how these behaviors work so that they can be predicted, but most economists have made the natural mistake of thinking that economics is somehow separate from the human substrate the way gravity is independent of the exact nature of the matter of its origin, only a product of the total mass. Economics is not like that, it is completely a product of human design – at least it was until some decisions began to be made by computerized algorithms. All that is needed to undo much of the mathematical work is a change in attitude or expectation in a population, thus the great energy devoted to controlling these very things.

While the predictions of economic models have been often unreliable, there are some general ways of looking at economic behavior that will continue to make sense so long as we operate on the principle of maximizing the accumulation of added value, i.e., the principle of trading with enmity.

After teeth brushing and putting on clean underwear most of our present lives are devoted to protecting our wealth and unprotecting the wealth of others (actually teeth brushing falls into both categories). My boss has a volume of wealth. I do the things he asks to pry loose some agreed on amount, that is, my actions unprotect his wealth for a moment. My labor, in turn, as been unprotected to a measured degree. He protects his wealth by not letting me just go his pile and take some; rather he has devised a system so that exact amounts can be delivered to me and others. I look for ways to unprotect as much as I can in the normal course of my activities (who knows how many pencils he has bought me) and my boss looks for ways to both protect his own and to unprotect mine. Every action in our economic lives and, many actions in parts of our days that we do not specifically recognize as economic, can be put clearly into two lists; actions that protect our wealth and actions that unprotect the wealth of others.

Our present economic fright is so transparently the result of a group of wealthy people trying to get more by creating and discovering a way to unprotect the little bits of wealth held by millions of average people! There are two basic ways to do that: control and offer a product that a great many people can be convinced that they need (Microsoft, food) or use the taxing system to get the many to pay your debts when you default on paying back money that you “borrow” (S&L defaults in the 1980s). Microsoft requires a product, infrastructure and a lot of work. “Mismanaging” vast sums, skimming off millions and then getting the tax system to bill the people requires the right contacts and political power. Mismanagement and stealing is by far the easier and the spare millions can purchase a lot of help.

Of the 300 million people in the US there are only a few tens of thousands who really understand the opportunities of the money system, really know how to unprotect wealth on a large scale; and of those who know how only a few have the connections to do it. The wealthy are very good at protecting theirs; it is a lot of work to unprotect their wealth and seldom worth it except for the random freelancer. The masses have a lot of wealth, but it is in tiny chunks. The infrastructure to unprotect and gather from them has to be huge (thus the neoconservative growth of government). Therefore, it is necessary to use the banking system and the government’s taxing powers to do the job right.

Oh yes, and where are those people who know how the money system works? They are drawn disproportionally to the banking/investment infrastructure. And where is the power and opportunity to develop political connections that can help protect these people and make available the tools to unprotect the wealth of others? Right there in the same banking, investment and regulatory community.

The way it looks to me is that we have a case of a 7-11 bandit; you know, some petty thieves specialize in convenience store robberies, unprotecting wealth with a cheap revolver. Some mega-crime families might very well specialize in banking/tax system robberies: getting a lot of money moving, ‘losing” a bunch of it on paper and getting the ‘government’ to cover the losses. The last big heist was when GHWB was vice president and president and now this one when GWB is president. The boy is good! Out did his dad in the destruction of Iraq and now has out done him with a banking scandal.

I’m not suggesting that the Bush boys put a bandana around their faces and used a Saturday night special (although Neil is still a mystery), but I am saying that the forces to unprotect wealth are like the water behind a dam; when you make a crack it just flows right on through. When the power of government taxation is made available by allowing, even pushing for, institutions that are too big to fail and oversight is so weakened that the regulators (sic) and the thieves can plan heists together, then the responsibility is that of accessory before the fact; a crime as serious as that of the actual perpetrators. A man was just executed in Texas on such a charge.

Was this an accident of the financial system? Not bloody likely. If you think that there is not a group of people with their funnels all built and ready to collect the shakings of the money tree into their coffers, then you probably are still looking to buy stock in Lehman brothers. Could this have been a swindle that got out of hand? Possible, but not likely; I think the plastic was put down wide enough to catch all the dead bodies.

The normal protections for the wealth of the middle class was lock-picked by the banking/investment system and the complicit taxing infrastructure is being used to collect the booty. In the 80s and early 90s taxpayers paid 125 billion to have money stolen from them (estimates of the true total cost are as high as 1.4 trillion dollars). This time we will pay a thousand billion (we cannot even speculate on true total cost) for the privilege of being robbed. The rhetoric of “saving the economy” is just so much boilerplate to cover a huge transfer of wealth to the economic elite made possible by Bush administration policies. And you count on it: every “correction” of the system will be analyzed for its potential use to further unprotect the wealth of all possible targets.

That is the way unprotecting wealth works. All wealth (capital, labor, debt, real estate, invention), any place that money moves or wealth is stored, can be skimmed from, secreted away, nibbled at, relabeled and otherwise have its protections momentarily weakened or removed. Smashing the window of a car unprotects the purse inside, getting a no-bid open ended contract without enforced performance conditions is still a smash and grab job, albeit more complex.

The argument that government needs to be run like a business does not remind us that the business of business is unprotecting the wealth of the consuming public. It is in the mindset of those in business: “How to I get a potential clientele to trade their wealth for my product or service?” Innovation, niche hunting, “marketing”, planned obsolescence, deceptive pricing and sizing, deceptive advertising, finessing safety and environmental regulation and many more actions, “good” and bad, are devoted to the primary event, when the wallet opens and the wealth is exposed. When business and government combine, business naturally sees the potential of government functions and powers for unprotecting the wealth of the masses. This has a name. It is fascism in democracy’s clothing.

In an added twist of gutter ruthlessness, the sort of thing the MSM calls “brilliant” campaign strategy, “affirm, affirm, affirm” has been added to the repertoire. If enough balls are tossed into the air, the audience may not realize that they are just falling to the ground and not being artfully juggled, especially when canned cheering and yells of “great juggling” are projected from the bought, paid for and otherwise compromised press.

Of course, Palin is only a symptom of our political disease. The sideshow magician has taken over where honest debate on matters of real concern once took place, not a new phenomenon, but increasingly troublesome as our options and opportunities are reduced by our increasing environmental, energy and resource challenges, exacerbated by our general failure to correctly evaluate our true role and responsibility in the changes of our world.

The most basic value that is being lost is honesty. Lies misdirect and disable response systems; which is, of course, why they are told. Lies are different from confusion. Simple confusion can be in the pursuit of veridicality. A lie exists to obscure veridicality. The very most dangerous and difficult human problem is believing and acting outside of biophysical reality. Our acceptance of lying as a “natural” human condition through which we expect to navigate is a first order change that we must make. Humans that lie must be shunned; intentional dishonesty rejected.

Recognizing lies is a great responsibility. Not only an abstract dedication to truth is required, but both a willingness and a capacity to reflect on one’s own thinking and nature, and an ethic of study of all that is neutral to or challenging of your own beliefs and knowledge. Darwin carried a notebook in which he wrote down only those things that challenged his positions; he said that it was easy to remember those things that he already believed, but difficult to keep in the mind that which was foreign to his understanding.

Add to a practice of challenging one’s own prejudgments a dedication to being as truthful in both substance and style as possible and, with like-minded others, to form communities that value and support deep truthfulness as an essential and primary value. Such communities can have incredible power through their renewing connection with reality. And they would tend to contain both honest conservative and honest liberal viewpoints. A dedication to exposing and dissolving the lie would draw together the complimentary strengths of the different thought habits.

McCain is a liar. Obama is a liar. Palin is a liar. Biden is a liar. Bush is liar. Cheney is a liar. It is sad for the world that this list would go on for thousands of pages. A “realist” would say that we must judge the degree and depth of the lie and pick the least offensive. But the damage is done. The lie, whether about the significant or the “insignificant”, takes away our power to respond. The most offensive liar should be shunned first and most aggressively, but it is ultimately the lie that must be overcome. If the basis of our “truth” is a lie then ultimately only the application of physical force is decisive, it becomes our only recourse to reality. We are clearly moving in that direction both internationally with our endless wars and more locally with police-state responses to dissent.

Even though all the major political actors are lying to us, and very likely to themselves, there is a difference at this stage of our situation that we must pragmatically recognize. We need to shun all liars for veridicality to be our standard, but when no one is telling truth distinctions in motive need to be made. This is very difficult and is the very reason that we have come to this pass in the first place, but for now we must shun the worst and challenge the rest. It is increasingly clear that the McCain campaign is affirmatively lying while the Obama campaign is lying as the standard practice and expectation of our time.

So who does one support and vote for in the coming election? First of all, this question conceals a major lie. Our elections are devices to select who will hold office, but they are not about the actual direction or leadership of the nation. No one with a real and possible agenda to invigorate the power of the majority can gain more than minor office. The present structure of governance is to support and protect extreme wealth and power and to increasingly weaken the greatest number’s access to the power to control, not just their governance, but even their own lives. To control their own lives the majority would have to have powers that would inhibit the desires of the elite. Political parties, the relations of the branches of government, the media reporting on government, most academics studying government and the beliefs of the ‘lied to’ public all support this truth, but as a truth that must not be told.

The question, ‘Who does one vote for?’ is not as important as making a struggle against what seems to you to be lies. Paul Krugman recently wrote in the NY Times that he recognized as lies many proclamations from the 2000 Bush campaign and assumed that lying would be the style of Bush’s presidency. It is certainly likely that many people recognized as lies statements from the Gore campaign. Krugman was able to satisfy himself that Bush was the more serious liar. The element that was missing among the masses was the attempt to discover a veridical version of events. It is clear in retrospect that almost any evaluation of the statements and counterstatements would find Bush and his people the more egregious liars. It is here that we see the power of lies to remove the capacity to respond. Tell many lies and people cannot act. Get people to believe one lie and they will act in ways that benefit the liar.

The millions of words spilling from the media maw about the present campaign’s truthfulness or lack there of reminds of noticing with surprise that shit comes from a puppy and then diving in it and rolling around. Does it not occur to these word dribblers to wipe up the mess? The answer, of course, is no. Outrage at Palin’s dishonesty and incompetence is simply rolling in the puppy poop, hardly different than repeating in wide-eyed wonder, “and did you know that Obama is a Muslim.”

We cannot either expect or force the MSM to report daily as the ‘above the fold’ lead: “Today’s Lies From Political Campaigns.” Such fully fact checked listings would change the nature of campaigns and could change the nature of governance. We could compare the NY Post’s, the NY Times‘, the WSJ’s and other’s listings for consistency; the expectation would be that, while some slanting of opinion would be inevitable, the fact checks should be roughly the same. But this is not going to happen, not without a fight.

Though there is a model. In the sciences the ethic is absolute transparency. A proper scientific report must have every statement verifiable either by reference to a peer reviewed source or by showing clearly how a result was obtained so that others can repeat the test. It is not perfect, but the ethic is to strongly reject the liar. As a result it is possible to act on the vast majority of the information produced by the sciences. The ethic of honesty and transparency is the reason, not the scientific method or some other special “science” thing.

We have come to expect that our social and media information is of questionable honesty. We have accepted this. The natural history of this process and the deep nature of misrepresenting, while interesting, is ultimately not the issue. Our very survival depends on being able to act with some accuracy in the world from the information that we gather, and to do that we must have a ethic of honesty in our social communications since that has become almost our only source for the information upon which we act.

The first action to change the nation has to be a dedication to personal honesty in our own dealings and to the diligent study of events so to measure the truthfulness of others. Just as we will not drill our way out of our energy troubles, we will not vote our way out of our governance troubles. Be honest in your own dealings, respect and support honesty in others, shun the liar (personally and politically) and create community with those who do the same. Let me tell you honestly, no one is going to lead us out of the perversion of governance we presently endure, not Obama, not McCain, not a Gandhi, Einstein, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln all rolled into one. It really is our turn this time.

Every species acts in the world as an “exceptional” entity, that is, no species is shy and retiring in the face of ecological success. But every species is on essentially equal footing with all other species in the sense that they are using the same basic tools for adaptation and are functioning on the same basic time scale. One species might evolve a generation length that speeds up adaptation rates, but only a little. Another might increase the costs for breeding, making more demands on the quality of the individual genotype, but again within the same order of magnitude typical of other species.
But, Human Exceptionalism is the result of an actually exceptional condition. The human adaptation is new to our immediate region of the universe. We are not on an equal footing with the other species of living things. Our capacity to respond to environmental conditions has gone from the generational change rates of biological evolution (DNA/protein mediated) to the change rates of consciousness order processes (mediated by “story”). This new process of adaptation is orders of magnitude faster, it is also orders of magnitude more fine-tuned to detail and it confers levels of power to action previously impossible for biological entities.

The questions suggests the dilemma: (1) Is such an exceptional adaptation a disease on the body of the biological world? The human species has increased from a few million living by evolutionary rules to 7 billion as our adaptation expresses its geometric growth potential. (2) Can an exceptional adaptation be inhibited to remain within the restraints of the biological world and still be exceptional? Other species with powerful adaptations fit into the biological order, but none have been as revolutionary as this one. (3) The consciousness order adaptation contains the enigmatic capacity of awareness with the seeming potential to decide how to use our adaptation; how might we, and can we, decide to self-limit our total impact on the biological world?

Our actual exceptionalness fuels the dangerous Exceptionalism of our behaviors and beliefs. This is really tricky: We are truly exceptional with the most powerful adaptation, as far we know, in the whole universe, yet for the survival of our world we need to be humble in the face of our completely obvious totally huge outrageous wonderfulness. I mean, get real, we can do anything we want and nothing can stop us. We have learned the rules of physics — except for a few that we will get soon enough. We can make genes dance for us like the hippos in Fantasia. We can suck the energy right off the sun and stuff it into computers that can do a billion billion calculations a second. We’ve got TV and refrigerators! And we should be humble? What a crock!

Accept for one little thing; well, maybe two or three. The surface of the earth is the ultimate exception, not us. We humans are only passengers on and in a space that is among the most rare physical stabilities in the universe. Even in the fullest explosion of our hubris there is no way that we could, with our own efforts, make the earth’s surface a living place or sustain it if the subtle designs of our solar system began to change. We, as the saying goes, live at the pleasure of our biosphere. That is Reality.

And yet, we do not act in that reality. Consistently failing to function in The Real is insanity. The natural Exceptionalism of a species to act in its own interests (this a part of the living condition and not to be confused with its counterpart in the consciousness order) is compounded by our ability to tell stories about how special we are. The design of belief as a guide for behavior allows us to hold such stories as truth… and voilà: Human Exceptionalism at a pathological level. Our real and remarkable capacities lead us to believe in imagined powers far beyond our true relationship with our world. A thing of great power, with little appreciation for the consequences of that power and almost no ability to control itself is a great danger to itself and others.

The consequences of this Madness is our present normal. The three pervious essays in this series look at important institutions and beliefs that are part of the Madness, and Human Exceptionalism underlies them all.

There are, of course, many ways that we are not exceptional. Our form and function is biologically based, we are animals with an evolutionary history that powerfully guides our behaviors. We are food for other organisms just as other organisms are food for us — we are part of the food web. Plants supply us, along with every other aerobic organism, with oxygen and glucose (at base, the only food there is on earth); there is no other source.

It is unimaginable that a tribal community could forget that they depend on the land, water and air to sustain them and yet we forget; we even argue that it somehow is not even so. Almost nothing could be crazier. There is no question that the vastly complex societies in which we live separate and seem to protect us from the natural world upon which we depend. That world is difficult to know about, and to care about when the cost of food is going up, the mortgage payment is a little harder to get together each month and your kid gets sick. Some tiny disembodied half-figure yells from the TV set that the problems will be fixed if you let them control the world, or some part of it. It seems silly, with such pressures, to think about plants making the oxygen that we breathe. Truly, the Madness is compelling. Ask any recovered madman or addict.

My argument is not to change the world. There is no way to move from the Madness that envelops our societies and our species. I think our trajectory is set. But I see hundreds of people and know that there are millions and even possible billions that feel these things; people who suspect that what they see and live is madness; wonder at their own sanity for wondering about the world they live in. I want to say to them that there is a way to live with at least some dignity and with less than more of Madness.

Life has always been a crapshoot. But living as a full member of the species of your birth can make it a blazingly joyous one — no matter how it goes down. It can be done. Every one of us has the pedigree. We were all born as full-fledged members of the honorable human, hominid, primate, mammalian, vertebrate, animal, multicellular, living linage. We all have the absolute right to specieshood and can act with sanity for a sustainable biosphere. It would help inform our political and economic actions and responsibilities. And that would make us very special indeed.

(This is the fourth and last essay of this series looking at the primary articles of faith that seem normal and essential to our present cultural life, but that are the underlying forces for damage to the biosphere, destruction of our specieshood and ultimately devastating to the most positive qualities of the cultural life we are trying to sustain.)