In times of Crisis people either run for safety, through Community or run towards an individual choice.
Much like the lifeboat mentality, the smart ones choose to stay with the strongest possible community.
In this case the boat we are all riding on.
The Big Earth tent of the sustainable climate and Environment…
Sadly the quick and the fleet-footed anxious or the rich enough to seek private survival means and those who choose to escape the common fate – can be written off.
The ones loosening the lifeboats and running off to save themselves are the ones certainly foregone as lost…
We are carbon-based lifeforms evolved to function on a rocky, water-covered planet circling a very average star in a very average galaxy.
As such, we spend the vast majority of our lives engaged in self-maintenance of various sorts; we are frail and temperamental creatures constantly at war with entropy, and our species’ answer to our physical dilemma is to pass along our genes to future generations of flesh-and-blood human beings. Our biological imperative to reproduce is all-invasive.
From here on people diverge.
The poor majority ones live with their fate and vastly happier than their rich counterparts when it comes to leave the mortal coil behind in the poker table of Life.
The rich minority ones nurse wet dreams of living forever and are deathly afraid of leaving the poker game. Maybe because they think they’ve got a lot of chips, they want to stick around forever. They go further. They aren’t ashamed to develop philosophies of self preservation going on something like the right to cheat death and achieve immortality.
Much like they don’t want to pay their taxes – they don’t want to pay the piper.
Or the harvester depending on your religious view. You pay with your soul for the wonderful trip that Life has been is what Dr Faust exclaims. Goethe shrugged and smiled when He put these words in motion…
Most of us follow our biological programming willingly enough, never seeking or perceiving alternatives. After all people naturally end up dead and their bodies are recycled into the earth.
But as new technologies and new ways of relating with our universe are explored and exploited, various forms of immortality appear less like impossibilities and more like evolutionary inevitabilities.
The world we’ve created for ourselves is a shadow of our reproductive imperative, and our institutions are symptomatic of our devotion to our short-lived physical selves. The activities of a typical day betray our dedication to maintaining reproductive viability. But the chemical phenomenon that gives the single-celled amoeba its raison d’etre seems somehow less-than-noble for a species that has evolved the singular and promising faculties of foresight and imagination.
Maybe the human species is approaching a point where the need to procreate in the biological sense, will be superseded by the sheer pleasure of thought itself. We will continue to be creators. But our slavish attachment to the physical world and all of its superficial excess will be left behind as we plunge forward, breaking down the perceived barriers between mind and brain, thought and flesh, sentience and circuitry.
The advent of artificial intelligence will likely result in a revolution of exponential magnitude. The future doesn’t bode well for carbon as a medium for information transfer. Why subject ourselves to the uncertainties of biological reproduction when we’re empowered with bodies and minds attuned to precise personal specifications?
As the human race migrates to custom-engineered realities, the definitions that now serve to separate “tool” from “user” will become increasingly meaningless. When the fragile meat-matrix of contemporary carbon-based humanity is abandoned in favor of lush new frontiers of our own devising, the genetic code (and its inherent instabilities and weaknesses) will fade into obsolescence, as all primitive devices eventually do. If we use DNA at all, it will be to truly create, the biological world our obedient and abiding molecular canvas.
Reproduction, per se, may never become obsolete, but at least we will no longer be at the mercy of its evolutionary mandates. Aesthetics and the definition of pleasure will necessarily adapt to our own caprices and augmented cognitive abilities. We will have all the time we need to shape and expand our horizons, ultimately viewing natural selection and the accepted inevitability of death as perverse historical curiosities, much how we presently regard the institution of slavery with loathing.
Now the institutions we create are just as easy to shape and change as our constructs and ideas. That is our models. Even opposing views of the models of what we hope to accomplish. After all this is intelligence:
Yet when it’s time to allow all of the ideas that don’t serve us anymore; to die off or be changed – we have a hard time.
Here comes Natural Selection to assist us; all over again.
The level Darwinian play field of Evolution is here working on our Models and Institutional constructs and businesses too. Why we need to kill some of our institutions and businesses early with Euthanasia to avoid social and economic costs will become evident here.
For example: let me ask a Question: What is the quickest way to kill a bank? Just deny them access to ready cash.
Over the past couple of year, a string of finance and banking institutions have found themselves in such a “liquidity crisis” and unable to convince the market they can honour their promises to pay back money they owe – they simply die off. The reality is we tried too hard to save them.
Now we have a liquidity crisis for sovereign nations with Greece, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Iceland, the UK, Czech republic, Romania, Slovakia et al, poised to fail at some point overburdened by mountains of debt. Debt largely accumulated in their mad hurry to save the Banker-Wankers from their errant ways.
Mountains of debt like toxic garbage mountains, do not make for a sustainable model of Life. Nor for a sustainable City, State or Nation… If we had learned that banking deaths are part of the landscape and no Heroics to save them are necessary – we would have been better off.
Yet these self immolations or swift deaths resulting in the general global financial crisis did not come without warning. Ample warnings that weren’t heeded by anyone.
Dozen years ago, a giant hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management collapsed when it too suffered a liquidity crisis. Yet banks and regulators seem not to have heeded the lessons from this wake-up call by improving the mathematical models that they use to manage their risk.
That raises a huge question: How did the risk modellers get it so far wrong?
I’ll tell you how: Let’s look at the Environment of the cities where almost 50% of humanity now lives. They are made of rich parts and vastly greater poor parts. Of course the Economists will tell you that the most sustainable are the ones with the major middle class suburbs and large segments of middle class dwellers living a Hollywood aspired lifestyle.
A proper ”shanty town” is Manila; the capital of the Philippines. Poverty reigns there like it does in all the huge Metropolis. Canton, Beijing, Shanghai, Lagos, Cairo or Mumbai or Delhi or any of the ancient cities.
Yet back in Manila is where we see the future contrast of our models clearly: That manila has beautiful colonial buildings matters little since over it towers a giant rubbish dump. It is a real mountain. Much like the one in the photos of Tokyo, it is a life giving mountain; only closer inside the city itself. Locals call it ”Smoky Mountain.”
Smokey Mountain is where we all can see and test the United Nations Millenium Development Goal’s basic truth.
Here is where we first seem to have come to realize, Why poverty, not affluence, is the environment’s number one enemy. The message seems clear: All the Philanthropists and philanthropocapitalists and Charity Focus nannies, and the legions of MPAs from the Charity sector societies and the UN aid agencies and just as many meat brains of US AID and Boston MBAs of the World Bank and the IMF, and the MIT poverty center and others from Washington Consensus; will all tell you in unison that: ”Poverty caused the rubbish dump; and that the shanty town dwellers are living in their own waste and polluting the planet.”
The easy answer rolls off their collective meaty lips: Eliminate poverty and You solve the Environmental Sustainability problems.
The truth is different, of course.
Yes, far different indeed. All the rubbish comes from the city’s middle-class suburbs and it arrives to be humanely processed. The shanty town is home to communities who survive by scavenging and recycling the junk. Far from being a nightmare – it is actually quite environmental in that it recycles more waste per human than any other city of this earth.
Get it?
Our Garbage is overflowing the cities and the capacity of the planet to deal with it… not because of the poor people but because the rich can’t be bothered to recycle it or to have the professional poor amongst them doing what is necessary to recycle their refuge. Same as the banking system can’t tolerate the poor lowly traders and lesser banks living and failing with risks spread out to the shareholders and depositors…They simply can’t tolerate symbiosis because it doesn’t look good… Maybe the poor can’t afford the rent in the high districts after all.
Same as we are reluctant to let the nimble traders, the new light banks, the one Mom and the two Pops small institutions and maverick hedge funds and carcass eaters break down and digest the big banks and spit out small parts of them, in fully functioning and evolved units.
That’s why we are failing wholesale. Because we can’t accept the value Poverty has in our Ecosystem and we fail to see the greater usefulness of the Poor people into Society than the rich.
Strange eh?
Yours,
Pano
PS:
Live with it.
Or make Peace with the Grand Reaper.
Your bluff…
