Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCLI–The Celebration of Our Own Undoing, Part 2
The Celebration of Our Own Undoing, Part 2
In Part 1 (see: Website, Medium, Substack), I attempted to lay the groundwork for understanding our predicament. I relied on some of the key scientists and researchers I have read.
William Catton’s Overshoot argues that our species has greatly overshot the carrying capacity of our planet, primarily through our extraction and reliance upon finite resources. The Maximum Power Principle described by Howard Odum asserts that humans, like every species, maximise energy transformation; a condition that inevitably leads to systemic collapse.
The authors of The Limits to Growth modelled a number of scenarios that showed unless significant changes were made to a number of our existing systems, our global industrial societies would overshoot the capacity of the planet to sustain us and we would experience planetary collapse in our current century. Archaeologist Joseph Tainter demonstrated that large complex societies collapse when their members find the costs of supporting continued investments in complexity exceed the benefits.
Ronald Wright argued that humans get caught in progress traps where the solutions to problems end up creating more problems that must be addressed by more solutions that make things increasingly worse and difficult. And finally, the MORT theory of Ajit Varki and Danny Brower suggests that the human capacity for denial is an evolutionary adaptation while the concept of wetiko of Indigenous groups creates a widespread mind-virus that exploits various blind spots leading to the group’s destruction.
I’m now going to move from the mechanics reviewed in Part 1 and attempt to show how these various ideas converge and see what this may mean for our future.
The Convergence
MORT explains how we evolved our denial capability and wetiko helps to clarify what that looks like at a societal-level scale. The convergence of these is potentially terrifying.
It would appear that the cognitive shift described by the MORT theory would qualify as a progress trap of the highest order. It not only allowed our remarkable “success” but now prevents us from recognising and acting on our predicament. We are for all intents and purposes relying upon Pleistocene era-developed software in an environment that has been altered beyond recognition. Those traits that Varki and Brower identify as part of what makes us human–such as irrational risk-taking and optimism bias–have become maladaptive at a planetary scale.
The blind spots that exist as a result of this are exploited mercilessly by wetiko through the feeding of our denial, amplification of our rationalisations, and turning our creativity against us; the individual capacity for self-deception has been manifested at a collective level. It would seem that wetiko is the psychological engine that has been extending our overshoot through the creation of a planetary-wide system that selects for maximum power and energy transformation as Odum’s Maximum Power Principle would predict.
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The Psychology of Denial
With this theoretical backstop, the question of why our species continues along the path of certain destruction despite the data and warnings that have been present for decades looms ever larger.
Perhaps a reasonable answer lies with the cognitive architecture I have been exploring in several of my Contemplations; we are kept from holding anxiety-provoking thoughts by a host of cognitive and psychological mechanisms. Our minds, it would seem, evolved to function in this manner–it is a feature, not a bug.
When confronted with the existential predicament of ecological overshoot the vast majority of people admit that they aren’t even aware of it, and those that do begin to see the perils of it tend to travel through the stages of Kubler-Ross’s grieving process beginning with denial and bargaining. Some make it all the way to acceptance of the predicament but most get stuck in one of the first two stages, with many if not most believing that human ingenuity and our technological prowess will win the day and can overcome any little “hurdle” Nature has in store for us.
The realisation of this is perhaps where the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance enters the gears and leads to even greater discomfort and denial. Humans desire a comfortable and anxiety-free existence but the reality of our overshoot predicament undermines this significantly. The unease that arises when aware of our plight can be unforgivingly painful and disruptive. One way to dissipate this mental splinter is to change one’s behaviour; however, most people find such a shift too disruptive and painful, so they numb the pain instead by minimising the issue. This numbing can be accomplished through salvation stories that assure us that our technology and/or political systems will find a solution, a means of overcoming any problem that arises.
But as I have explored in my We’re Saved! Contemplations, these narratives consistently overhype our abilities to address our predicaments. They are flawed solutions that in fact exacerbate our overshoot and rest upon psychological defence mechanisms camouflaged as innovative progress, hiding their true destructive nature. Greenwashing, suppression of drawbacks, faith in unhatched chickens, blindness to scale, carbon tunnel vision, and avoidance of their additive nature to our extraction and consumption are some of the narrative management aspects to the comforting tales woven by their marketers. Responsibility for failure to attain their lofty promises is completely avoided by the constant dangling of hope to sustain their stories of salvation.
The most insidious aspect of these tales is perhaps their perpetuation of the infinite growth possibility. Every “solution” reinforces the unquestioned paradigm driving our overshoot: business-as-usual expansion. There are no meaningful and difficult conversations about degrowth and societal simplification–except as an “academic” curiosity. The solutions presented to humanity are public goods for the benefit of all. The continued extraction, industrialisation, and concentration of wealth and power are well hidden behind elaborate anxiety-reducing narratives of collective salvation.
The denial seems to go well beyond individuals struggling with their personal anxiety; it has become socially organised through the establishment of communities of denial. People create social circles as well as news and social media feeds that reinforce our particular stories. We create pacts with others so that we will look away from the tales that challenge our beliefs; confronting them–sometimes venomously–when they speak too loudly. We refuse to let the music stop as we want the party to continue; we don’t want to have the silence that might allow the whispers of concern and potential threats to get through to us since those whispers might remind us of our own mortality.
And this reminder may be the root of this entire SNAFU. A primal and vertebrate terror of our ultimate demise could be behind all the rationalisations and social pacts in order to reduce our anxiety and fear. We don’t want to be reminded of our ultimate death. Our personal or societal end. We believe in the technologies because they deliver the promise of salvation; be it personal through tales of uploading our minds to complex digital systems, societal via perpetual technological innovation, and even species-level by leaving our planet due to its finite limitations and colonising the galaxy. These are not simply convenient narratives but have become our hero systems, the bulwarks against the existential void that sits directly ahead. To admit that chasing the perpetual growth chalice on a finite planet is doomed to end in eventual collapse of our complex living arrangements is unthinkable. We would rather celebrate the systems and technologies that are exacerbating our predicaments, than admit that we and our societies are impermanent things.
William Catton wrote about this situation, pointing out that those who opposed human ecology and its evidence for overshoot appeared to be demonstrating a means of coping with the chasm between past convictions and present circumstances. It was a way to defend oneself and one’s beliefs against such a storyline and evidence. The urgent need for a cessation to the war between the technosphere and biosphere was vehemently denied–and often attacked–in order to ignore the existential threat ever present.
The salvation narratives are a collective defence mechanism allowing the uncomfortable truths of our predicaments to be avoided, especially the ones that demonstrate our complex industrial societies cannot be sustained in perpetuity. Believing in the perpetual growth narrative also grants humanity the illusion of agency and control. We cannot only fix our way out of our dilemmas but we can avoid changing the behaviours that have led us into overshoot–overconsumption, destructive extraction, and perpetual expansion.
And it should come as no surprise that our ruling elite leverage these stories and our psychology to sustain the destructive systems that support status quo power and wealth structures. Whether or not they understand that our denial and the salvation narratives suppress our general failure to challenge such a situation is moot. They continue to support and fund the green growth stories, the false solutions, and the comforting fictions since it allows them to continue accumulating wealth and consolidating power. Their purposes are served perfectly by the psychology of denial and they have become ever more adept at exploiting it.
The Tragedy of Our Nature
The work of the thinkers and researchers I have drawn upon helps to describe the mechanics of our various predicaments, but it is MORT and wetiko that appear to outline the psychology of our situation. They help to show why we continue to pursue self-destructive behaviours and actions despite the mounting evidence that we are on a suicidal path–why we celebrate our undoing. We’re not evil or stupid; we’re victims of our evolution and the “success” it has brought. The powerful brains we have celebrated as the impetus of our rise to the “top” of the evolutionary ladder have brought with them a side effect not anticipated: the ability to deny anxiety-provoking thoughts. This denial, when amplified across our species on a planetary scale, has become a mind-virus leading to actions that go directly against our best interests.
So, this denial is a feature not a bug. According to MORT, it has allowed us to evolve unparalleled intelligence; but is now preventing us from realising we have greatly overshot our natural environmental carrying capacity, that we have reached the point of diminishing returns for our investments in complexity, and that we have become trapped within our own progress.
The Fork in the Road
We have reached the two roads diverging in a yellow wood that Robert Frost wrote about, and we must face a similar choice. We can (and likely will) continue with our business-as-usual path by expanding our planetary footprint with a larger and larger population as well as increased complexity. Alternatively, we could (but likely won’t) take the less travelled path of purposeful contraction and simplification.
We have been following the first path for millennia; a path that took a significant shift (in the wrong direction) when we began extracting and leveraging a one-time cache of finite and ancient hydrocarbon energy. If we were to look at just the past 6,000–12,000 years of our history compared to the previous 100,000 or more, we would see a vertiginous increase in population and complexity–one that increased in speed for both variables when we began burning hydrocarbons.
We don’t need better or more complex technologies. We need honest acknowledgement of the biophysical limits that exist and the destructive consequences of our industrialisation, and to begin in earnest our difficult conversations about degrowth, simplification, relocalisation, and harm reduction. Status quo arrangements are currently foreclosing these discussions, but so are those by people with supposedly the best of intentions who argue that more technology is the best pathway to pursue.
I have argued repeatedly that I would like to see our dwindling resources dedicated to decommissioning safely those significantly dangerous complexities we have created and spread around the planet–nuclear power plants and their radioactive waste, biosafety labs and their dangerous pathogens, chemical production and storage facilities and their polluting toxins–as well as the relocalisation to as great an extent as possible of our basic needs: potable water, food production, and regional shelter needs. Maybe by pursuing these actions humans might create a few successful pockets of our species–as well as others–that could emerge out of the increasingly tight bottleneck our success has led us into.
Seeing Wetiko
There’s something else lurking in the shadows as well, however: wetiko. Levy argues we can break free from this contagious mind parasite by seeing it–the first step in ridding oneself of a delusion is to recognise that you are deluded.
I think with the realisation that there is little that our species can do to avoid the negative consequences of pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet and that we are well into ecological overshoot, I have finally reached the stage of acceptance. When I first encountered our dilemmas I held a firm belief that we could “science our way out” of them, especially as most do–via human ingenuity and technology. I don’t find myself in that place any more; in fact, very far from it.
As a consequence of better understanding how complex our universe is, the manner in which our species perceives and interprets this complexity, and our rationalising nature, I have grown to question almost every narrative we share nowadays.
One of the questions that dogs me is whether or not we can recognise our inherited tendency for denial and choose to see the universe for how it truly is rather than how we’d like it to be. Varki and Brower would probably suggest the probability of this is extremely low. Apparently the evolution of a capacity for denial alongside intelligence has occurred only once on our planet and it is yet to be seen if we can evolve the ability to overcome this denial.
It would seem that until we can face head-on the discomfort that the conversations we need to have about what our future should be in a world of hard, biophysical limits and the harm we are making worse by chasing technological “fixes”, we will continue to create and believe in salvation stories that give comfort rather than reflect reality. With this, unfortunately, comes an acceleration of the “collapse” they claim to help avoid.
We celebrate what is familiar, comforting, and what allows us to avoid the grief of our mortality–individual, societal, planetary–it doesn’t matter if it is also destroying us. We will deny, bargain with, and rationalise away discomforting evidence because our minds are wired to do so.
However, the evidence is increasingly pointing towards the fact that the natural inheritance that has helped us to expand into all ecological niches and construct a world of technological wonders may well be our undoing.
There’s a very, very slim chance that by seeing wetiko we might break free from this mind-virus that exploits our blind spots. That we might dedicate what remains of our dwindling resource to decommissioning all those dangerous complexities and relocalising our most basic needs. That a few pockets of refuge can be built and a few might get through the bottleneck we’ve led our world into.
It’s more likely, however, that we will continue to dance towards the edge of the abyss, celebrating our genius, singing loudly praises to ourselves, and drowning out the sound of the approaching waves; even as the water laps around our ankles and rises. It is our nature after all.
Post-Script
A reader’s comment on Part 1 has prompted me to reflect on this topic even more deeply, with my response to him leading to a suggestion that I create a separate post with my thoughts. Part 2 above was written well before this interaction took place and I have decided to leave it as is and take up the idea of writing a Part 3 incorporating the dialogue that arose in the near future…
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Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.
Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.
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Humans are simply acting like all other species. Trying to find explanations of why we do that seems like a bizarre exercise but it is what we do. MORT, of course, is one way some of us try to convince ourselves of the reason. Even when degrowth is discussed it is imagined that we can degrow our economies to a "sustainable scale" as though scale is the arbiter of what is sustainable and what isn't. It's a form of denial by those who claim not to be in denial of our predicament.
We, by force of will, can't change our behaviour, though our behaviour can change if our brains are receptive to change, but it's an uncertain transition. Our brains have developed from genes, culture and upbringing to be what they are. It'll take a lot to shift the configuration of those neurons and synapses so that we yearn for a hunter-gatherer existence (the only sustainable existence). Even then, there are over 8 billion brains to be changed. It may be that there are only two paths: continued expansion or collapse to a simple and primitive way of living. Anything else may be just a temporary pause on one of those paths (of course, the former path will eventually lead to the latter, in any case).
The path we have been following for millennia is not the wrong path, it is just the inevitable path for a species, especially our species. Your hope that humanity will do the right thing and make safe all of those enterprises that could wreak havoc on the future of all species, once society starts to break down is, I'm afraid (since I'd like that, also) wishful thinking. It would require the impossible act of us, as a species, recognising the limits and admitting that the party is over. It won't happen.
I sometimes wonder if anything would be different if science hadn't discovered the physical limits of our planet. I suspect it wouldn't have changed much, except maybe the timing of our inevitable collapse.
The synthesis of MORT and wetiko clarify each other in a way I hadn't seen laid out this clearly. But I think collapsing them into a single species-wide mechanism loses something important in wetiko specifically.
Jack Forbes, who did the original work developing wetiko as an analytic category in Columbus and Other Cannibals, is explicit that he's describing the psychology of European colonial and imperial expansion, an insatiable, consuming relationship to land and to other people, not a trait he attributes to humans as such. He's writing partly in direct response to societies that didn't organize this way, and using wetiko to name what was specific and aberrant about the ones that did.
MORT, by contrast, is a genuinely species-wide evolutionary claim in Varki and Brower's own framing, denial as a cognitive adaptation present in Homo sapiens generally. However, plenty of scholars argue that framing ecological denial or extractive logic as intrinsic to "humans" erases the many societies that did not organize around unlimited growth, which even Forbes discussed.
Running the two together as one converging mechanism makes wetiko do work it wasn't built to do. If wetiko is species-wide, the thousands of years of societies that lived within ecological limits without hydrocarbon extraction become an anomaly needing explanation, rather than the norm interrupted by a specific and comparatively recent civilizational pattern. That matters for where the piece lands practically, too.
If overshoot is a MORT-style universal feature, the honest response really is closer to acceptance, since there's no version of the species that didn't do this. If it's a colonial feature riding on top of a universal capacity for denial, the response looks different: not every society failed this test, which means the failure isn't written into the species, it's written into a particular economic and civilizational arrangement that expanded globally and became mistaken for human nature itself.
I've been developing this bug-not-feature argument at more length on my own Substack, if it's useful: https://substack.com/@ishasnow
I think the piece is stronger read that way, honestly, since it gives the "few pockets" you mention at the end somewhere real to come from, rather than treating survival as pure luck against a universal trait.