The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - John Gowdy: "Superorganisms, Crazy Ants, and Fire Apes, Oh My!"

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

On this episode, we meet with Ecological Economist, John Gowdy. Gowdy explores the revolution in biology and its significance in society. How do different cultures manifest human nature? What role has agriculture, and specific crops, played in how societies developed? Further, Gowdy discusses the relationship between capitalism, surplus, and The Superorganism. Does human agency matter to the Superorganism? What role do blind evolutionary mechanisms play in the development of our society? About John Gowdy: John M. Gowdy is Professor of Economics and Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He is the recipient of the Herman Daly Award for contributions to ecological economics. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/14-john-gowdy

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Today's guest is Ecological Economist John Gowdy. I've come to know John over the past 20 years in my research on the human predicament. And every time I thought I discovered some novel aspect of our situation, be it our hunter-gatherer mines, energy depletion, climate change, cooperation, or the superorganism like optimizing for

surplus dynamic, which began with agriculture. I discovered that John had written about that same topic five to ten years earlier. Of all my guests, John's framing of where humans came from and how our society has self-organized via a market system is most aligned with my own. As such, it's my great pleasure to introduce my friend and one of my intellectual mentors, John Gowdy, to discuss how humans got to this point. Hello, John. Good to see you.

Hello, Nate. Good to see you, person. So when I worked on Wall Street, there were people known as macro guys. And they were people in the hedge fund industry that connected interest rates and foreign exchange and equities and geopolitics and geopolitics and tell how everything worked. And it would predict how things went in the financial system. Then when I left Wall Street, I started to meet people like you who connected an even broader macro view of the human system, the human ecosystem. And finance and the whole Wall Street thing is a tiny piece of how energy, human behavior, the environment, the future, all the different systems dynamics fit together.

And so with that preamble, I will say, I'm very very. excited to have you on the show because you are probably the only human being on the planet that knows my story better than I know it myself. So I want to dive into some of the underpinnings of the great simplification, the human superorganism, how our species got to this point and looking forward to the implications. So let's start at the foundation. you have long been a student of evolution and how evolution guides our behaviors and our thinking. So let's start there.

Can you summarize the revolution in evolutionary biology and its relevance for social evolution and our current predicament? Well, I'll try. I can give it a shot. Of course, there's a lot going on in biology and the philosophy of evolution and so on. I think, you know, the main thing is this biology has really gotten beyond the selfish gene. And one of the reasons, evolution, biological evolution is largely missing from the social sciences for a number of reasons. Part of it is the reaction against early versions of social biology, mostly led by economists, actually.

E.O. Wilson moved on from the selfishine thing a long time ago. But when it first came out in the 70s, the people really pushing it were economists. There was a special issue of business week on sociobiology. And I think the headline was something like why humans are programmed to be selfish and why socialism won't work, something like that. So economists really jumped on that to say, look, aha, it's human nature to be selfish. What's happening now and really driven by a lot of experiment? It's still genetics, but it's way beyond the selfish gene. For example, there's something called epigenetics, which is the interactions of,

genes in the environment. So we have all kinds of redundancy in our genes, you know, all species do, and sometimes parts of it are expressed and sometimes others. Yeah, there was a nifty experiment, a study in Australia with, I think it was the kind of Finch, but they discovered that the mother finches sing to the eggs, and the song differs according to environmental conditions. Now, I don't remember the details, but for example, if, if the, there's an abundance of food, the weather is warm, then the eggs hatch out differently than if it's

cold and there's a sparsity of food. So somehow this information, and the eggs as adults, you know, develop differently. You know, in some case, the chicks are smaller, in some cases larger. Well, it's been a long time since I looked at the details of this study, but wasn't there something in World War I or two where they tested pregnant women on either side? of the German border and those that were within Germany who were well fed, ended up having average size adults from the babies that were born. But those that were born outside of the German border because they didn't have access to food and the mothers were really skinny, they actually became obese at a much higher propensity

later in life because there was a trigger that said you're being born into a world of scarcity. Yeah, a lot of people, I had a friend actually who was in World War II, he was Jewish, and as a child, he was, you know, shuffled in and out of these horrible places and they're practically starved. And anyway, I mean, he was a really big eater. So people sort of overcompensate. A lot of people, prisoners in World War II later became cooks, you know, for example, because they were obsessed with food. That might be a little different than this. I mean, because you could say that's because of the, you know, their development in the womb. and so on. Yeah, but studies like that are sort of coming to the forefront now.

Well, it's probably just a generalization because I think my mom was perfectly normal and look at how I'm turning out. My mother was the world's worst cook, so it's going to stay skinny for a long time. Not mine. Okay, carry on with the importance of evolution. Yeah, and again, as a whole new field, there's even a sort of a branch now called the evolution of evolvability. So organisms can actually evolve to be responsive to environmental changes. Again, it's just natural selection and passing on genes and all that. I think evolutionary biology is moved way beyond these crude representations of sociobiology. And social sciences really should take a second look at what's going on.

So why haven't they? There used to be something called the standard social science model that treated us as blank slings. creatures when we were born and then everything gets dumped in from our parenting and our schooling and our environment. But we come born with prepared learning. So there actually is a human nature. What is human nature? Can you expand on that? Human nature is very, you know, it depends. In some societies, caring, cooperations comes to the forefront and other societies like ours. Selfishness comes to the forefront. And as I talk about in my book, it has a lot to do actually with the economic base. There's another interesting

study published in science a couple of years ago, and this study looked at two villages in China. One, there were similar in similar areas and so on, but one depended on wheat, the other depended on rice, you know, a rice growing economy. And rice apparently is a more cooperative exercise, harvesting and all that. People worked together. And people that had grew up in the rice-based community scored higher on these standard tests in terms of cooperation, you know, respecting others and so on. In the corn growing area, they tended to be more selfish, have more self-centered values. Again, I think that the surface is just being scratched on this. But there is a wide range of human nature. For instance, we are not solitary animals like

leopards or jaguars. So we're incredibly social. I mean, you can tick off. the list of things that is part of our nature. We care about the present more than the future as biological organisms. We care about social status. We can be hijacked by modern technology, all those things. But I'm just wondering why have you spent a good portion of your academic erudite experience looking at human behavior? Why does knowing about who we are and how we got here inform our situation and our possible paths forward. I probably got into it. I guess I've been trained as an economist.

I've been an economist for 40-something years now. And it was a reaction against the standard model, you know, purely selfish, don't care about others. And the standard, you know, what's called Valrazi and general equilibrium model, you can't have interpersonal comparisons of preferences, you know, to get technical about it. But my preferences can't affect yours if you act like a rational human. being. You can take the information into account, but you don't care about my well-being, whether they have more or less than so on. So that's what microeconomics teaches, is that I can't care

about your well-being? Yeah, the basic microeconomic model, yeah. And it's the basic point of it is the mathematical proof for the efficiency of a competitive economy. And it actually works well in a very narrow kind of situation like the financial decisions you used to make. You really want to get the highest return on the money or the money of your clients. So that's if we assume that the thing of value in our society is monetary representations of surplus. We parse everything of value into that digit, into that dollar. Therefore, if I help my neighbor or if I smile at a random person in downtown Chicago, those things are not included in an economist formulas of success or utility or anything. Yeah.

And again, if you're making an investment decision for a client as a stockbroker or something, you shouldn't take those into account. Your job is to maximize the discounted rate of return on however much money your client has. So can you give me a short few minute summary of why microeconomics is flawed or wrong because it misses these core aspects of evolutionary biology and how we got here. Or is it relevant at all? Yeah. Let me give just a quick answer.

Again, the problem is that the model has been stretched and applied to things that it shouldn't be applied to. For example, discounting the future, economists do something called cost-benefit analysis to calculate the cost and benefits, for example, of climate change mitigation. And if you have any sort of discount rate, you know, the higher the discount rate, the more you value the present over the future. And the damages from climate change are going to be really severe going out, you know, years, decades, maybe 100 years from now. And temperature is 3 degrees Celsius warmer. And with any kind of positive discount rate, those costs of climate change disappear. So everything is sort of weighted toward the immediate present, which again, if you're an individual,

making a decision at a point in time, that makes sense. But not if you're making decision as a society, as a member of society, looking at the future well-being of, you know, two or three generations ahead. So does microeconomics reference evolution and E.O. Wilson's work on cooperation and multi-level selection at all, or is it just completely disregarded? Well, they're different. I mean, economics is sort of fragmenting now also. So there's a whole field of evolutionary economics that does take those things into account,

but it's sort of shunted to the side in terms of the field. You know, people like my chairman, oh, yeah, what you're doing is really interesting, but it's not economics. That was the standard answer I got. But economics treats us as self-interested actors, which means that all I care about is the utility that lead to my decisions, and I am not caring about other people at all. yet evolution teaches that we are absolutely other regarding. We care immensely about other people.

So the whole premise is missing a huge aspect of our phenotype, yes? Yeah, and that's why the recent stuff on group selection, I think, is important. And you can, you know, according to standard model, then altruism shouldn't exist. Because if I help you, I'm reducing my fitness, my chances of survival are less. And again, in a population of selfish people in altruists, the selfish people will win out, you know, win the battle to pass their genes on. But in terms of a, if you take it also the group into account, if I'm in a small group, say, you know, a hunter-gather group 20,000 years ago, if my group doesn't survive, then I don't survive either. You know, I'm down the tubes. So if there's, say, 20 people in my group, I cooperate.

I help others, then my chances of passing on my G's are greater. So there's a trade-off between individual selfishness and the benefits to the group. And that's really just standard genetics also. There's nothing in that model that goes outside genetics. There are the cases that it does. But that seems so clear to me. David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson wrote about that, I think, over 10 years ago now. But it's still never been accepted, really, in economics or even.

in biology to some extent? Not really. I think David Sloan Wilson has done more than anybody else to sort of resurrect group selection. I think it's on the verge of becoming respectable. Actually, it is respectable. He has a lot of followers, but also a lot of reaction against it. So for an economist, John, you also happen to be an ant expert, and you do a lot of studying on the social insects.

Why is the study of ants important or relevant to understand? understanding our human situation. That's a great question. There are three kinds of organisms that dominate the planet, and those are humans, ants, and termites, you know, more than any other. And, you know, people are obsessed with primate behavior because they're our closest relatives genetically. There's just a finding that came out showing that, I think it was a chimpanzee.

They observed one chimpanzee actually using end. insects to treat a wound on another chimpanzee. And that, you know, I mean, it's just pretty incredible. It's a kind of behavior. Wow, look at that. But if you look at ants and termites and humans, those are only three animals that live in city, states, of millions of people. They're the only animals that have agriculture in a sense that they produce their own

food supply, which, of course, gives them a tremendous advantage. So they dominate the planet. Ants actually, they have warfare among ant colonies, very organized warfare. There's a group called a very large colony in California that's been in this war with another group for decades. And millions and millions of ants are killed in battles each year between those two kinds, those two colonies. The Pentagon actually studies these ant warfare for tactics. They use them in training. So it's pretty amazing.

Yeah, the ants even have suicide bombers. They have these ants that go into enemy lines and blow themselves up. They're the only animal, other animals, ants, and termites with complex divisions of labor, dozens and dozens of different occupations gear to certain tasks. So just, I mean, for me, when I stumbled on this stuff, it was just amazing. How can we, every little tiny little behavior of a primate, we, ooh and ah, but all around us are these things that really operate just like human societies. Well, I know the numbers are pretty scary right now that humans and our livestock

outweigh all other wild animals approximately 50 to 1 in weight on the planet, but we weigh around the same as ants. Yeah, human. That's E.O. Wilson's estimation that the biomass of humans is about the same as ants. So what is the concept of ultra-sociality, which is you use throughout your papers and your recent book? Can you explain what is ultra-sociality? Ultra-sociality. This came from work I did with Lacey Crawl, a colleague at SUNY Cortland.

And we started this stuff, I guess, maybe 12, 15 years ago. And it turns out her background is very similar to mine. And she also has an undergraduate degree in anthropology. She's very sympathetic to hunter-gatherers. Her stepfather was a guy named Paul Shepard, who popularized the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and said it was superior to hours. She trained as an economist, concerned about social justice and the environment and so on. About the same time, I started working with David Wilson. And we had a grant to do a series of workshops at Duke University.

So I met a lot of biologists, including some ant biologists that sort of turned me on to this stuff. But ultra-sociality, the way Lisi and I define it, we sort of center on agriculture. These are societies, and sort of the pioneeringness was a guy named Donald Campbell, who started writing most of the work of his, I know, started in the 70s. So ultra-sociality, as we found, again, we focus on agriculture and cultivating crops. So as hunter gathers, we lived off flows from the environment, you know, day-to-day flows. So, and if you did something wrong, say, the economies were sustainable because they had to be. If you over-harvested or over-hunted, then it became right back, you know, right back to bite you.

It was clear what you were doing. It also kept the population stable. It also encouraged egalitarian societies because it really was a knowledge economy. You know, growing up in one of these cultures, you had the knowledge you knew to make a living. You know, the plants together and the seasons and all that. So ultra-sociality with agriculture, we broke out of that and started, instead of living off-floes, we started producing for surplus. So we took control of the production of food, you know, from beginning to end, clearing land, tilling the soil, planting crops, eliminating species that threaten the crops. and so on. It led to an incredible explosion in a division of labor. And also, with ultra-sociality,

let me just throw this in. We'll probably come back to it later. But humans have casts, and ants do not, which surprises a lot of people. Casts meaning hereditary wealth that's passed on. Only the queen breeds in ant colonies, so the workers are sterile, so they don't have descendants. there's nothing to pass on. So that makes human society different, and it's also created a lot of problems. How long have we had an hereditary wealth, just out of curiosity? That's an interesting question, too. These ideas probably go back to hunters and gathers.

One example that, sort of a counter example to agriculture that people use are the Northwest Coast Indians, and they had settled communities in the beginnings of hierarchies without agriculture. And that's because they had these techniques. They lived, this is Northwest Coast, they lived off salmon. And certain times a year they had these really heavy salmon runs. They could harvest the salmon, smoke them and store them and save them to eat later. So it was a kind of surplus without agriculture.

And there were the beginnings of hierarchical societies because certain families came to control the best salmon run sites. And so they had more. But there were also all kinds of leveling mechanisms. It's like the potlatch and so on. Right. The potlatch is when they would get social status by giving stuff away, by throwing big feasts. And rather than hoarding stuff and possessing it, they would show lavish displays of sharing. And that's what gained status for the potlatch Indians, yes?

Yeah. And it's interesting, too, because after contact, you know, with Westerners, then they got more material things. And the potlatches became, you know, really got out of hand. They would have these huge ceremonies where they would actually destroy wealth. you know, burn blankets, burn possessions, and so on. Oh, really? Kind of like Alexander's super tramp and Into the Wild, he burned his last dollars. Oh, yeah, yeah.

So getting back to the main threat here, John, were humans always ultra-social, or is that just a new development with agriculture? It was a new development with agriculture. That's what we argue. What were we before then? What term? Well, there's a bunch of terms flying around. One is you social.

We are very a cooperative species. you know, we function as members of groups and so on. Let me get back, too, to a point you made earlier about heredity. Humans are somewhat unique, and most of our neurons are formed after birth. And so our brains are actually partially hardwired to become members of specific societies. And even infants, for example, can recognize the language of their mothers. If a Chinese child, you know, someone comes in speaking Chinese, a child will look up and look around, but not if an English speaker comes into the room. So in a sense, we know we're programmed to be part of certain cultures, hardwired, if you will.

So what would be a bigger shock? A baby time machined from New York City today back 10,000 years or a baby from 10,000 years ago, time machine to modern New York City. Can you hypothesize about that? Probably not. Yeah, it would be, you know, it depends on how old the child is. I mean, as the younger, the more adaptable, the more adapted, the child would come for particular culture. A newborn baby would be adapted to whatever society it was in. That's why it's so hard, I guess this is your point.

It's why it's so hard to talk about human nature. You know, human nature varies with the material conditions and a bunch of other things. Well, and we are incredibly behaviorally plastic is. We, our values emanate from how we make a living as a culture. You wrote about that in your new superorganism book. So surplus, energy surplus, which was agricultural surplus 10,000 years ago, and then hit the jackpot with fossil carbon, we have this massive amount of energy surplus supporting our societies.

And that kind of spills over into our value system, yes? What do you think about that? Oh, yeah, I mean, energy. Well, there were two tapping into solar energy with agriculture. And we cleared land, we cleared forest and plants and replace it with our crops, which, you know, expropriated some of that solar energy. Yeah, we also, you know, started using, you know, wood for fuel and so on on a massive scale. And then, of course, just the energy bonanza that came with fossil fuels was another sort of jumpstart. Why is ultra-sociality important to our current situation, the fact that we're ultra-social? Well, with ultra-sociality, again, we started focusing on the production of surplus and storage.

Again, it also sort of meant reorganizing production, complex division of labor. And we also got into this expansionist phase. You know, say you're growing crops. So you start producing surplus. And you always plant more than you think you're going to need because you could have a bad year, something that happens to the crops and so on. So most years you have more food than it's required for that population. Okay, what happens when any other species faces that? Their population increases.

If it's a good year for grass, then you have more deer. If it's a good year for deer, you have more lions and so on and so forth. So I think it's that surplus production of food that really triggered population growth. And then, of course, the population is larger. You have to plant more food so you get into this cycle. And an interesting thing, too, is that after the beginning of agriculture, it really took thousands of years for city-states to develop. For most of human history, the population was fairly stable, just a few million down to a few hundred thousand, maybe a few ten. tens of thousands. But anyway, you didn't really increase. After agriculture, it didn't increase

that much. It was like $4 million at the beginning. I think it went up to, I don't know, $6 million, maybe, 5,000 years later. And there's a lot of explanations for this. A good book to read is James Scott's Against the Green. Yeah, it's a great title. So it took a while for these city states to develop, and there may have been climate change. Scott argues that these early mixed economies were in estuarine environments. Agriculture was there, but it was really a supplement to the hunting, gathering, fishing that went on these very rich ecosystems. We're in what now is what's called a Holocene. It's really characterized by a very warm and stable climate. Before that, the climate was just too variable to support agriculture. The year-to-year fluctuations were just enormous.

I mean, you could have 10, 20-degree fluctuations, say in summer temperatures and just a, just a few decades. So agriculture really couldn't take hold. It's the climate became more stable than these wild grains, especially, became more dependable. People started relying on them more. Maybe they started scattering seeds and then coming back, you know, every year to harvest them. They selectively harvested seeds that had certain characteristics like non-shattering. And, you know, people didn't choose agriculture. We just sort of stumbled into this very gradually, not noticeable from generation to generation. And again, the more dependent you came, maybe some people started staying behind.

Sedentary females are more fertile than hunter-gather women who get a lot of exercise and are always on the move. So it was just kind of a, you know, a step-by-step thing that, you know, we didn't choose. It's the quirk of history that we stumbled into. So there are some people that are taking this notion that we are ultra-social that we cooperate at larger units and kind of misunderstanding and misapplying this concept of ultra-sociality. You're aware of the noosphere, yes?

So the idea of the newosphere are these stages in evolution. You have the geosphere, the biosphere, and then the new sphere, no sphere. It's based on human thought and human ideas. So it goes beyond sort of the physical basis. And, yeah, there are all kinds of sort of underlying things there. Let me just read a quote by a guy named Francis Highland. In principle, the global brain can eliminate all the problems of poverty, pollution, resource exhaustion, conflict, ignorance, superstition, and work-induced stress. Moreover, it should be able to restore our physical and psychological environment to a more natural state,

without the need to abandon the comfort and security brought by technology. Thus, it would create a new Garden of Eden and inspiring, relaxed, and joyful life for all. This is another quote from that same paper by Highland, and he talks about sort of the technology that enabled this. Giant swarms of miniature sensors may be distributed ubiquitously across the cities, lands, oceans, ice sheets, and even atmosphere of the earth by spraying them from robotic planes. There'd be so small that they could extract the tiny amount of energy they need directly from their environment, from sunlight or waves, thus function automatically.

So these things would facilitate peer-to-peer communication and feed into this global thing. It's just crazy stuff to me. I mean, it just sounds insane. How does that contrast to your epic story of humans and the superorganism, et cetera? Well, again, if you look at real ultra-social societies and the role of individuals in those societies, the more complex the social organization, the simpler are individuals within that society. And again, the way I use superorganism or the way most people do, I think,

it's a misnaming in some way because it's not an organism. It's a self-organizing system with no self. It's just this system that came together to function and perpetuate itself, you know, through time. So members of these societies, you know, like ants, the simpler the information that they convey, you know, to the top, the better that information can be used. So if you're a group of ants, say your group of ants are assigned to find a new nest site, all the super organism wants is this which their site is better a or b and they don't want to argue about why your philosophical reasons why you should choose this site so with respect to the noosphere the reason that that is incorrect based on our way of looking at how humans got here is there is no hive mind right in human societies the superorganism is not like a star trek borg with a higher collective intelligence it's It's more like a body where individual humans are akin to individual cells in the body, yes? Yeah.

In some sense, I think I said that in the book, although they're in sense like a beehive with bees is better than a body with cells because you can send bees out for, you know, a mile away to find food. And you still have that individual initiative preserved, but it's to serve the higher superorganism. So the superorganism story, and as you're aware, I wrote a paper and you wrote a book on the topic, is we self-organized after climate stabilized to maximize surplus, which led to division of labor, storing of surplus, population and growth explosion. Fast forward 10,000 years or so, and we found fossil carbon, which boosted our fuel and supply further. Fast forward a couple hundred years and we're no longer optimizing for surplus. We're optimizing for surplus markers like financial claims on surplus. And the whole thing is out of control. There is no one in charge. It's no one's fault.

It was an emergent property of so many humans pursuing their individual goals under an overarching goal of economic growth. and financial maximization. When was the inflection point of that? And can you expand on what I just said? Did I get that right? Yeah, I mean, society says, and as you pointed out, as hunter-gatherers, we were a social group.

You can see, of course, everything has beginnings. You can see the roots of certain kinds of human behavior in hunter-gatherer societies. People came together to operate as a unit, whether it was hunting mammoths or gathering crops or whatever. It took on a different character with the production of surplus, the emphasis on growth and expansion, and especially took off with these state societies. But yeah, I mean, all these things were there before. In terms of, I mean, there was kind of social brain, you know, caring about others and all that. It developed when we were hunter-gatherers. So there's something there, but it took on a different character with agriculture. And actually,

I think I mentioned ants and the larger the group, the smaller the brains of ants that have agriculture, their brains are about 10% smaller. And the same thing happened with humans. Their brains are about 10% smaller than they were at the beginning of agriculture. Because we've outsourced a lot of our behavioral flexibility to the cloud, to the group to perform other things. Yeah. That's part of the Neosphere. The example they give the Internet is supposed to evolve into this. global brain, you know, pornography and misinformation for everybody, you know.

When did the market become so strong that it became uncontrollable? I mean, I think we are outsourcing our decision making to the market. And, you know, like it or not, it's kind of in control because we have to keep growing to maintain stability. So that reality obviates any paths of wisdom or constraint. When did we cross that threshold? where it was out of anyone's control. That's really hard to say. I think it took a leap with the whole growth thing, you know, making people produce surplus. Again, this is James Scott said.

It really started with state societies, you know, certain people in control. If you were the king or queen or whatever, a priest in a state, the more people, the stronger you were to compete with other states, you know, the more troops you could amass to go out. And you had another choices. You know, you could hunt and gather. you could practice agriculture, you could steal from your neighbors. So that was sort of another emphasis for larger size, another impetus for larger size. So here is a quote from your book. Today we face two broad existential crises, the rapacious economic

exploitation destabilizing the natural world and staggering inequality. Individual well-being and the health of the Earth's ecosystems are being sacrificed to the needs of the global market. With agriculture, nature and people became impersonal inputs to support the production of economic surplus. Can you expand on that? Well, again, with these, societies we most admire, you know, we talk about ancient Greece, ancient Rome and philosophy and literature. I mean, two-thirds of the people in those societies were slaves. You know, there's kind of more to it than that. But we, again, individuals who were put in the service of the hierarchy, the elite, whose job it was to perpetuate this kind of superorganism.

I mean, it gets really complicated with people because of the notion of elites taking the surplus. And there's always this battle going on too, and it's going on now sort of with the vengeance between sort of enlightened self-interest. You know, part of the elite says, look, we can't push, we can't take everything. We have to keep people pretty happier there or vote against us. so on. And then on the other side, you have these people who just want to take the money and runs or still everything that isn't nailed down. You see that playing out now sort of on the world stage. So what is the concept that you write about? And I believe Donald Campbell

first coined this, the concept of downward causation. Okay, downward causation means that the higher levels in the hierarchy tend to dominate the lower levels. And so this super organism, this thing that's not a thing, self-organizing system that has no self, the rules to keep it going and keep growing and keep operating harness, that's us, the people that are within the system, the units that were in the system, to do its will. And again, you know, the words don't exist. It doesn't have a will. It's not a thing.

But it acts as if it does. Well, civilization eats energy, in my opinion, and it's doing whatever it can to access more energy by changing the rules or issuing debt or whatever. It has to until it can't. But within that, there are levels of hierarchy. Go on, John. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of energy, you mentioned finance. I mean, something like one or two percent of the total energy use now is made to mine bitcoins. I mean, how crazy is that? I mean, there's their whole countries like Iceland is tapping its hydropower to mine bitcoins. Well, in contrast, the way money comes into existence is actually much more energy intensive, not the printing of the linen paper dollar bill. But the fact that the central banks and commercial banks can create money with no tether to biophysical resources with just a keystroke. And so the money creation itself doesn't spend a lot of energy. But all of a sudden there's huge more monetary claims that people can spend on energy. So at least Bitcoin, there's only going to be 21 million Bitcoins ever.

But it's not the answer to our society's woes, in my opinion. Can we ever get away from downward causation, or is that a byproduct of the human superorganism? Or why is that important? Yeah. I mean, okay, there's something called, like this is going to do this end, but it's something called the Great Acceleration, you know, the period after World War II, where the system really just took off. I mean, so this is really within my lifetime. Population has gone from $2.5 million to about $7.000, yeah, billion to $7.5. So it's tripled.

Economic output is quadrupled. Energy use is tripled. It's just an amazing thing. And there are a lot of reasons for that. You know, the breakup of the old order after two world wars and a Great Depression and so on. Okay. The same thing. In recent decades, these ant super colonies have spread worldwide.

And so, for example, Argentine ants. There's a colony in North America, another one in Europe. you know, Italy and Spain, another one in Australia, another one in Japan. And these colonies spread, by the way, because of humans, increased commerce and trade and boats and so on. But you can take an ant from Argentina and put it in a colony in North America, and it will be accepted. Why is that?

Why is that? Because it's, there's, when an ant colony moves into a new area, it's an open, you know, an open thing and has plenty of food, plenty of room to expand, it pays to cooperate because the larger the colony, the better it can tap in to these resources. So the ant colony that exists sees the stranger ant that was a stowaway on a ship or whatever and says, you're welcome here because it's free labor for us. Yeah, right. We can combine and make ourselves better off.

It's sort of like the altruism group thing. You know, it pays to be altruistic if you get more resources. You can grow and be better off. And apparently it's a breakdown. Again, I'm not a biologist. is a gene or allele that ordinarily would make an ant fight an ant from another colony, even of the same species. So one Argentine colony fights another colony.

And they still do, by the way. You have these super large Argentine ant colonies fighting each other. But anyway, so the breakdown of that individuality for cooperation makes sense when resources are abundant and so on. really interesting thing I've just sort of stumbled on this the last few months. These super colonies are starting to fragment and break down because there's one, I think it's bird island in the seashells. This was a group of ants called Crazy Ants. There's several species that have these super colonies.

The ant colony took over the whole island. I think they were introduced in the 1990s. By 2004, they took over the whole island. And three years later, the whole thing fragmented, the population crashed by about 99% into these sort of tiny little fragmented colonies. Resources became scarce that didn't pay to cooperate. So when that happens, the system fragments. So it was a reindeer on St. Matthew's Island sort of situation? Yeah, except, again, this was a social group.

And reindeer didn't cooperate with each other. It was just resource abundance. Ultra-sociality is something different. And interestingly, the same. The same thing, and this is a point I'm trying to make in a paper, same thing is now happening with globalization, I think. It's starting to break down. Global trade is actually starting to decline even before COVID. Now, it's hard.

You know, you can't say, is this going to continue? Is this a trend that's going to happen? But you can certainly see it all over the world, and certainly in the United States, groups that used to cooperate or fighting each other, people at each other's throats. I mean, it just never seen the hostile now between political points. parties between groups and so on. So you're making a similarity between crazy ants and fire apes, so to speak? Yeah, I think I'm onto something there. Again, it's, you know, we have to wait a few years to see what happens.

So do you have insights on whether human societies decentralize or continue to centralize during the late stages of the superorganism being able to grow? It should, it's growth slows down or start. to reverse, then there should be a decentralization, which I argue would be a great thing for the human species. Why? Well, the periods of the city-states were actually very rare. I mean, past history societies were characterized by collapse, you know, overshoot, collapse,

whatever you want to talk about it. Most of the time was these in-between periods, what we call barbarians. James Scott makes a really strong case that most people were much better off as far. barbarians than they were as members of these state societies. You had regional economies, you had more autonomy, you didn't have the state imposing these heavy taxes and burdens and military service on the public. So, you know, I really think that's where we're headed again in the next, it could be two, three hundred years. But I think it's the human superericism disintegrates. We'll go back to regional economies probably without agriculture because of climate change.

So another term you use in your book, which I had not seen before, is totipotency. Does that apply here at all? Not directly there. Totoponcy is from the ant literature. And it made something like the ability for members of society, in this case, ants, to perform all the tasks in society. So in ultra-social societies, you have, like, for example, you have doorkeeper ants. Their only job is to put, they have these huge heads, they stand by the door and block it and to keep enemies out. That's their only job.

They can't do any of the other tasks like cut leaves, carry leaves, and so on. So the more complex society, the simpler individuals get in the sense that they can't perform all the functions that society needs to keep going. That's absolutely human society. Yeah. I mean, we have, and you could disagree about the math, but fossil. coal, oil, and natural gas do the work of around 500 billion humans relative to 5 billion real humans. So what is the real relationship between jobs and work?

Because we're paying pennies on the dollar for most of our laborers who are fossil armies. So, you know, I'm just good at doing podcasts and playing tricks with my dogs. I couldn't build something or do art or construct a house. or anything like that. Yeah. And if you were a member of a hunter-gathered society, say in the upper Pleistocene, there were specializations,

but it mostly had to do with age and gender. You know, you did certain things when you're young, other things older. But you had the knowledge to survive in that society. And the important thing there is you weren't dependent on specific others for your well-being, you know, the way to make a living.

You knew where the plants were, knew where the animals were you could go out and hunt them. You've often told me that with the exception of the last hundred years where we had the massive advances from medicine and medical care, that humans in the 19th century were in many ways worse off than we were 10,000 years ago because we had been all this downward causation and everything. Can you explain that for a minute or so? Yeah, there's been a lot of really good research on that. The main guy whose articles I read and I actually emailed him was Clark Spencer Larson. And he documents, he had this massive grant from NSF or something. He documented like the decline in human health after agriculture.

People are shorter. They didn't live as long. They had more, you know, teeth and bone abnormalities compared to hunter-gathers. And they were also sort of pawns in this system, you know, that they didn't have the freedom to do what they want. And Hunter Gatherers actually apparently had a lot of freedom. I mean, you could, they were in small groups of, you know, 20 to 50, but at least in Europe, in the summers, when times are good, they came together with groups of maybe a couple hundred. You could leave one group and go with another group. Wives could leave their husbands go with someone else as they felt like it.

So a lot more autonomy than they have. Yeah, I read Sex at Dawn. I thought that was a very interesting book. That's a great book. Yeah, I was a... Yeah. To me, it's obvious that humans can live differently than we are now, and we're going to have to. This podcast is called The Great Simplification.

I think we're going to have an across-the-board lower living standards, at least for material throughput in coming decades. And we're going to have to figure out how to navigate that. But why does how we lived 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago, why does it change what's coming in the next 10 or 20 years? Or is it getting back to what you said before that it gives me. people hope that we can construct a different society. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, for me, it's important. You know, the more I read about 100 gathers, I was a student of anthropology, I was an archaeological digs when I was a student. But you just start looking at how the people lived, you know, the capacity, the mental capacity they had to have to make a living, the interaction

with each other, they depended on each other. It just seems to me to be a merhonious, harmonious, environmentally stable way of living. And I think we're going back to that. I mean, it's obvious that this society can't continue, whether it lasts a few years, a few decades, or a couple of centuries. I'm just trying to look beyond and see what's likely to come next. If we're lucky and fossil fuels run out, as soon as I hope you're right, and they run out soon. My only problem with peak oil, I mean, where is it? A lot of us in the 70s were hoping that it would change the There would be energy pinches that would make us start living a different way. But then we went to globalization and we went to credit, which allowed us to get the next tranche.

By the way, just for the record, John, I have never said we're running out. I've said the amount of cheap energy to afford this level of complexity and scale is going to start to pinch. Let me, can I follow up on that in just a minute? Yes, you can do whatever you want. Yeah. So I was lucky enough in the 70s to study with a guy named Nicholas Shorchescu Rocian. It was just another accent of history. You know, I just got now the Army.

I went to, you know, it wasn't a particularly good school, West Virginia University. And my advisor said, well, the first day you ought to check out this guy, Shorchesky, and I picked up his book, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, that had just come out. And he really took me under his wing for the next few years. He was there every other semester. So that book just came out. Everybody was talking about peak oil. There were long gas lines.

They were probably too young to remember. But everything was falling into place. You know, it looked like it was going to be a real sea change. And in some sense, it was. I mean, certainly energy prices quadrupled, I think, in the 70s with Iranian Revolution and all that. But it didn't really crash the system like a lot of us hoped it would. Well, it wasn't peak oil, but it was peak music, I think, the 70s. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we'll have you back for another podcast for that. That's a very complicated story on, because the United States did peak in 1970. And we never pierced that peak if you look at the breakdown of the provinces, except when we started to access the source rock, which is light, tight oil and the shales. And then there was a boost that again peaked in 2019. And yeah. Okay. Some tough questions to remain. You have talked about and well, I get many people in my sphere blaming our current problems on capitalism. And I think that is overly simplistic. Let me read a quote from your recent book. Some societies were able to change the course of their histories, but most did not. Agriculture did not inevitably lead to global capitalism.

Many agricultural societies followed different paths, but today's global socioeconomic system arose directly from the early state societies of the Middle East. So can you unpack the relationship between capitalism, surplus, and the superorganism. Wow, it's a tough assignment. Now, let me just pick up a couple of points. The early state societies, the economy was really organized by governments, by the state. Okay, society organized the military.

It organized the agricultural production, especially through taxes. And that leads me to what's happening today. This dichotomy between the free market or the market and the state, I think, is totally fictitious. If you look at every industrial economy, you know, the developed economies, the state represents somewhere between, you know, low 30s, high 40s. No, yeah, even low to high 30s, most of them, in terms of percentage of state spending on GDP. So the real question is just how, you know, where does the money go? In the Scandinavian countries, a lot more of it goes for public welfare, countries like the U.S., a lot of it goes. for public welfare, countries like the U.S., a lot of it goes to military and private corporations.

But these corporations could not exist without government spending. And that's what's so annoying about, you know, some of the sort of Nouveau-Riche billionaires. Well, let me name names, Elon Musk. Tesla got going with almost half a billion dollar loan in 2009 under the, you know, the recovery package, Obama and the Senate. I think it was $440 million. And now, of course, Musk is running around and saying, oh, free enterprise, get the state offerbacks and all that. I also read that a half of Tesla's profits come from selling carbon credits to other, which is another government state boondoggle.

Well, there's a deeper layer of it than that, which is we pay pennies and the dollars for the main input to our economies, which is coal, oil, natural gas. Yeah, heavily subsidized by government. Well, not only that, it's subsidized by 10 million years plus of Earth's geological cross. Yeah, exactly. So what I usually tell people is that what's happening isn't the fault of capitalism, but capitalism is in the service of the superorganism. What do you think about that? Yeah, and especially the ideology of capitalism.

There's a chapter in my book on neoliberal ideology. It's really interesting. One of the probably the father is Friedrich Hayek, and he really believed in the concept of the superfluism. organism in group selection. He was friends with a biologist. Apparently, I think it was at Cambridge, that turned him onto this stuff. But he describes the market as being a kind of superorganism. It's the supreme information processor. The more things, the more decisions we turn over to the superorganism, the better society will be. And that's, I think, one of the main things that come

out of the work that Lacey Kroll and I did. The superorganism, the ultra-social system, is not benign. And it works against the well-being of the individual members, namely us, of that superorganism. Can you give a few examples? Well, you know, just, well, early on, you know, the decline in health when the superorganism started. Yeah, I mean, you sort of look at the choice, well, the shrinking brain, that's another human

brain, is shrunk by 10%. And the fact that people have to work 40, 50, 60 hours a week to pay for basic needs that We're marketed to and we don't have health care to pay for everything. Yeah. And the system creates, creates work, creates needs that we have to sort of fall in line for. And, you know, how much choice do we really have? You have to be a part of the superorganism. I mean, there are people that leave and sort of break off and are self-sufficient in the woods somewhere, but it's hard to do that.

So that leads to another question on choice. So here's a quote from your book, John. The superorganism doesn't care about fairness or the environment because it is not a conscious, morally concerned entity. As we look around, we tend to see everything as examples of human choices. As individuals, we make choices every day, sometimes life-changing choices. But what if the social we does not choose? What if blind evolutionary mechanisms are largely responsible for human civilization and its

consequences. Can you unpack this, John? How does this jive with people saying, for example, we need to consciously redesign our living systems? What are the boundaries of humans choosing or primarily responding? Yeah. And again, if you sort of step back, and that's actually this sort of line of thought can be applied to a lot of a lot of things. There's another good book, a short history of progress, Ronald Wright. He has this great quote in that I've used in several places. But he talks about Cortez landing in Mexico. Oh, you had these two cultures. Hunter gather. They evolved from simple hunter-gathered cultures, not in contact for thousands of years. And what did Cortez see when he landed in Mexico? He saw kings, queens, courts, markets, roads, bridges, literature, art, music.

I mean, it was almost a carbon copy of what was going on Europe, although probably a little better. It evolved independently on two sides of the Atlantic. So there must be some. drivers going on that underlie that. You know, the same thing with ultra-sociality. Why do humans ants and termites have these complex systems with the vision of labor, production of surplus, and task differentiation and all that? Do we choose or not? I don't think cultures choose.

And I had in there, there are examples of cultures that change. They're not too many. I can only think of one. And that's a culture called Tikapia in the South Pacific. I think I got that from Jarra Diamond, too. Yep, that was in Jira Diamonds. And Tokugawa, Japan, also an example of where they navigated some resource challenges. Right, that's right.

That's another one. But they're few and far between. So if we don't choose, then we have to react to what's coming. Yeah. And you can, again, that example, sort of a fragmentation of the global economy. I think one thing, if you want to have policies, you know, go with the direction that evolution is. going and not against it. So in the epic breadth of your knowledge of human history, anthropology, energy, climate,

resources, systems, what are some possible ways forward? If in the very unlikely event, you would be advising top-level politicians, what is the solutions or mitigative steps given this framing? I know that's not an easy question. Yeah. One thing, you know, this is a paper. I wrote a paper for futures. The journal Future is some called Our Hunter Gather Future or something like that.

And I got one really good review, which is rare. I mean, not positive, but really useful review. And he or she argued on, he said, just forget about the near future. What you want to do is look ahead 100, 200 years. You don't want to predict. And it's somehow, if you go out 200,000. years, it's actually easier to predict things. It's easier to predict the effects on the climate, for example, of a certain level of CO2 after the economy adjusts, I mean, the environment adjusts,

we come back to equilibrium and so on. So that, to me, was a real breakthrough, sort of focusing on that distant future. So in terms of policy, you know, what are the implications? And really, I mean, most of them are common sense, and people, you know, we should say they should do this anyway. You want to preserve as much of the natural world, large tracks, you know, like Wilson's, E.O. Wilson's half earth. So there'll be something left for hunter-gathered descendants. In terms of climate change, the thing you really want to focus on is agriculture. A stable climate made agriculture possible because of the, well, the stability, you know, the lack of fluctuations and so on. we seem to already be going back to a period where the climate really affects, and I know the climate always affects agriculture, but you seem to have these sort of really massive crop failures because of climate change, flood droughts, and so on.

That's starting a lot faster than a lot sooner than I thought it would. So how can we put in? Again, you want to make the transition as painless as possible, I'm sure it will be painful. But the more we can establish mechanisms to move food back and forth when, you know, with the stuff hits the fan with crop failures of wheat, corn, and so on. And obviously, the lower we keep temperature increases, the better off will be. It makes a big difference whether it goes up by three degrees Celsius or six or eight, as some of the models predict. Yeah, all futures are not equivalent as far as that goes. Here's a tough question for you, John.

Why are so few people, you and I and our colleagues, talking about this framing of humans, self-organizing as individuals, families, small businesses, corporations, and nation states to optimize surplus. And there's a superorganism that's overarching. It's not a real organism, but since it optimizes for growth, it acts as if it were an organism. And we're going to go pedal to the metal until we have no longer any cans to kick. And then there's a decline that's inevitable. Why is that just absolutely not in the public discussion? Do you have any speculation? I think it goes back. Marshall Sallens use the term cosmologies,

is sort of described these sort of overarching worldviews. Today it's progress, growth is everything. and sort of this, I mean, this philosophy of growth or the necessity for growth. I mean, it's everywhere. I mean, you've been involved in ecological economics, so am I. But, you know, what do they say? Well, a new person running for president. Maybe I said the same thing when I ran for president a long time ago. But we have to grow the society.

We need more members. You have to increase membership and bring in more money so it could have more outreach programs and so on. You know, I'm not saying that's not a good thing. But everywhere you look at growth is this built. in. That's how you succeed. Is growth built into the human genome? Are we optimized as individuals for growth? No. I would say no. I think growth really came with the focus on surplus, maximizing surplus. And before that, there was a level of sufficiency. By the way, what was the name of the book 25 years ago? I bought that book when I was still on Wall Street, the one that you edited with Richard Lee about Hunter Gassie. Matherers? Unlimited means. Limited wants unlimited means. Right, right. I'll put it in the show notes.

So, because there are a lot of people that take our biology too far and say as biological organisms, we will always want more. And I think that's probably 20 to 30 percent accurate. And I think the 70 to 80 percent is the culture that we reside in. Yeah. And again, some of it, again, human nature, it's just a matter of which part of human nature is is emphasized by particular cultures. On that topic, one thing that I wanted to ask you is inequality natural. Is inequality a natural product of economic energy surplus or are we naturally in equal? I have an opinion on this, but you've looked at it a lot more. Yeah, again, the word natural, there's something in biology called the naturalist fallacy,

which basically means just because something is natural doesn't mean it's good. I'm sure there were, again, all these things, you have the beginnings of all these things in upper Pleistocene hunter-gathers. I'm sure there were people in higher status and other, and so on. You know, some men are better-looking women or better-looking men, better hunters. So we always had differentiation on status, but consumption was equal, pretty much. Yeah, and there were always checks, you know, very severe checks on one person gaining an advantage. You know, for example, and a lot of tribes, there are people who are going to. to be really good hunters. But the hunter that killed the animal doesn't get to distribute the

meat. It's the person that owns the arrow that killed the animal. So again, it's the separation from production from distribution, which I think is critical. We don't have those checks anymore. And part of the reason is all those ancestral conditions of shame and pride and respect and reciprocity. We're sitting in our own little castle ordering stuff from Amazon. And we don't feel those things because we're not in a hut or a village or a house with 10 other people that we're having to depend on every day. So I hope that some of that reciprocity will come back as we're forced to deal with less energy surplus. Yeah, and apparently money really has a negative effect on cooperation. There's some really interesting studies there too. This is a really ingenious

study, they had an old car. This guy had an old car and he pretended to be broken down, you know, needed help. And then he'd kept a record of the cars that stopped to help him. The more expensive the car, the least likely it was that the occupant would stop. So Mercedes BMW, you know, Jaguars, they go right by. How would you explain that from an anthropological perspective? It seems like money gives people independence. The more money you have, the more independent.

independent you can be from other people. Oh my God. That's so profound and simple. I think that's right. And unfortunately, I think with what's coming, people see the blue skies today, but they know there are storm clouds on the horizon in our culture. And so we live in a culture that has optimized our values around growth and pecuniary measures. So when we get stressed, I'm afraid people are going to try to even make more. money and be more individualistic so that they have a cushion to support them and turn that

money into things, whatever, I don't know what I'm going to need, but I'm going to need something. And so paradoxically, right before we're going to massively need more social interaction and a network of friends, people are going to be overly focused on monetary hoarding. Yeah. And that really seems to be happening with the vengeance now. I mean, you get, I mean, what did Trump do? That major piece of legislation was the tax cut for billionaires. Those are the people who are funding campaigns.

Actually, I read somewhere where 40% of campaign funding comes not from the 1%, not from the 1 tenth of 1%, but from the 100th of 1%. So is the inequality today kind of like a power law that is a byproduct of the growth-based superorganism that we're so rich as a culture and that over time, every year, every decade, those chips, those claims on real resources digitally accrue in a smaller and smaller portion of people. Is that just energy surplus combined with time and it's just a power law? Or what do you think about that? Yeah, I was just kind of leery of applying equations to these things. It's a great book by Walter Scheidel called The Great Leveler.

And he looks at, you know, again, 10,000-year history of, you know, China, Middle East, Europe, and so on. And he says the longer a culture and economy of society is stable, the more unequal it becomes. Because the powers it be have time to consolidate. They get control to courts, the laws, the legal system. And they take more and more until the system crashes. And if you think now, you know, it's been 70 years since a major war war, know, depending on what happens in Ukraine. But there hasn't really been a major World War for that length of time.

Before that, you had a breakdown of the, you know, the elite, the aristocratic families in Europe especially, again, with World War II, the Great Depression and all that. And that broke up the old, you know, autocrats, paved the way for new blood, new thinking to come in. I mean, there's so many levels of these things. But yeah, that might be happening now. Again, it seems like inequality is getting worse by leaps and bounds. And it has to break sometime, but who knows what form it'll take. Well, given all the conversations and emails we've had over the years, we packed a lot into this. But I'm sure we skipped over a lot.

So let me ask you some closing questions that I ask all my guests. What kind of advice, John, would you give to young people? who discover your work and understand that they are alive during the time of the superorganism and all the risks that you outlined to economies, politics, climate change, and the general human predicament. My first comment would be just enjoy life. You know, try not to let this, just everything that's happening get you down. Stop watching the news as much as you can. I mean, I'm trying not to.

But, you know, the focus now just to seem any negative story, that that's what they, they report. And get out and enjoy nature. The world is a wonderful place. I mean, there are wolves and bears and a lot to see. Take care of yourself. Take care of your family and friends. And you have to find some job that you enjoy and can obviously support yourself. But there are a lot of choices out there. You know, there are a lot of opportunities if you're if you're just starting out for, I think, really meaningful, you know, successful careers that you can do what you want. I would point to climate change and food, climate change in fisheries. It's going to be at times of turmoil, but there are always, you know, people need things in times

of turmoil. So you suggested people go out and spend time in nature. There's wolves and bears. That's not exactly what most people want. Yeah. But you just went, what do you do for fun? I know you just got back from a trip where you saw some wolves. Yeah, my wife just went on a winter wolf watching trip in Yellowstone for about a week.

That was really wonderful. And there are one of the high points of my life was last spring seeing a mother and two bear cubs right in my backyard. Really? In New York? In the upstate New York. Oh, my gosh. But it was a, you know, I mean, something like that just sticks with you. And actually, another studies have been done sort of well-being.

They looked at what, if people get a windfall, say you get, I don't know, $5,000 tax return or something. A couple of years later, people are happiest with. spending their money on things like vacations and not a new TV or whatever people buy now. So experience is over financial. Experience over material things. I'm not the first person to say this, of course, because it goes back to Buddha and Jesus. No, and I think everyone intuitively feels that. Yeah.

You know, and it's hard to do sometimes, you know. You have to force yourself. So what other things do you do for fun and get those experiences? One of the main things that makes us human is music. So I try to, I'm happy now that, you know, things are opening up, I can go out to concerts. I play the guitar not particularly well, but I do, you know, I play old-time acoustic blues stuff. I'll go up to Fatswaller and that's about as late as I get. I did not know that.

I did not know that. So, John, what do you care most about in the world? I guess, you know, this is the things, you know, typical sort of progressive, I care about the natural world preserving nature. Some of the things I've worked on might be of interest. I did some work with the United Nations a few years ago trying to make a case to protect the Sude wetland in South Sudan. I bring this up because I just got a call from the U.N. today, you know, wanted me to do some stuff. Apparently, so the Sude wetland is this vast area. It's the second biggest wetland in the world next to the penitale in Paraguay.

But there's a plan to drain it to pump more water in the Nile to help agriculture downstream in Sudan and especially Egypt. I mean, this would be an environmental catastrophe. It's really a stupid thing to do because they have all these rich cultures and traditions. The animal migration there may be larger than the one in the Serengeti. So the suit is running straight into the superorganism. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's really being pushed by Egypt and the Chinese.

Yeah, it's a complicated thing. There's a dam in Ethiopia called a Renaissance dam that just started producing electricity. That that will cut some water flow to Egypt, and they're really scared about that. So they're trying to, you know, buy off the leaders in South Sudan to make it go forward. So other than some of the things you mentioned on this conversation, what issue or event or trajectory are you most worried about in the coming 10 years or so? I guess it would be the sort of the disintegration, again, to pick on Republicans, but many in the Republican Party seem to be giving up on the idea of democracy, you know, subverting elections,

even setting up mechanisms to nullify elections after they happen. And I see this is, I don't think it'll happen, but I see this as being a real threat. for the next next two elections. And, you know, I mean, it only takes one time. If, you know, dictators cancel elections and stay in power, then that's pretty much it. You know, it never goes back. Is democracy synonymous with an intact superorganism? Have you thought about that?

I think, well, yeah, I mean, democracy. I begin talking about the individuals within the superorganism. No, it's not democratic. I mean, the superorganism. That's also interestingly in Hayek's work also in a thing called a Mount Pellarine Society that got him going. But, yeah, I mean, they talk very openly in their writings. You know, this is back probably 50, 60s, 70s about, you know, keeping people stupid, not spending much on education so people won't be able to understand what's happening. You know, keeping people dependent as possible on the functioning of the system.

And, you know, I mean, you think about that, the people who are most vulnerable to the system dying out are those at the bottom. You know, they don't have any room to spare. Their income falls by 10% they're screwed. You know, you and I could take it. Probably most readers, listeners, is it podcast. But, you know, if you're on the bottom, you can't. And that seems to be where a lot of the reactionary forces are coming from. Although those at the bottom did vote overwhelmingly for Biden in the last election,

under $100,000, it was something like $55-4545 or $5643 for Biden. Above $100,000 income, it was all Trump or mostly Trump. So what are you most hopeful about any trends or possibilities in the coming decade or so? The coming decade, I guess I'm most hopeful that this fragmentation will, will keep going and take a positive direction. And the good thing about it, okay, sort of the, you know, the right wing is fragmenting. I mean, it's fragmenting from globalization, but it's also fragmenting, you know, within itself. And you have conspiracy theories sort of pushing out other conspiracy theories.

It's really fascinating to watch this if you don't read too much of it. Yeah, I mean, the social algorithms are just optimizing for extreme on the left and the right. Yeah, yeah, right. Which, you know, is ultimately one of my biggest worries because your story and how humans could live differently or better is just not like the science story is downvoted on the social media algorithms because it's not inflammatory or novel. And it's also a little scary, which is why it's being suppressed. And again, heavily funded by, yeah, and heavily funded by far right billionaires. Do you have any other words of wisdom, advice? or closing thoughts for our listeners?

Well, I guess, you know, one thought is just, you know, we've talked, we've hit on this a couple of times, but just try to look at what's happening underneath everything. You know, for example, there's a lot of talk about inflation. It seems on the news, I do watch the business channel a lot. And it's always blamed on sort of specific things. Well, it's this policy. The Federal Reserve is doing too little or too much.

But inflation is happening all over the world in very different economies, no matter what the external policy is. So just dig down deeper. You know, why is it happening? It's supply chain woes. It has to do with, you know, probably energy shortages. But these try to get away from this sort of proximate causes and look at ultimate causes, you know, dig down to the bottom. You know, the thing with, you know, ants, termites, and humans, why do we have cities, States with millions and millions of people. It's not because humans decided to practice agriculture

and decided to build cities. It's these economic forces that really drove that outcome. And that, I think, can help you put things in perspectives and, again, put policy solutions where they might do the most good. Could we ever have a human culture where anthropologists and systems ecologists were the high status men and women as opposed to economists, or is economists by definition riding high on the superorganism, so they almost have to have high social status. Do you have any thought on that? Yeah, probably not.

I mean, again, that brings up a lot of things too. Again, economists, the job of mainstream economics is to justify market capitalism. You know, again, as we've already said, that capitalism is not the deep underlying cause. It's just kind of the latest manifestation of growth and exploitation and all that. But, yeah, I mean, the job of economists is to protect the status quo to a large extent. And that's not to say that they're not a lot of dimensions to the status quo with different factions having their own economists. But yeah, it'd be hard to imagine, like a president's council of sociologists, you know. You know, it's laughable, right?

We can dream. Thank you, John, and thank you for all of your work over the decades. And as you're well aware, you had a big influence on my unpacking the core situation of our human predicament. All right. So ultra-social Cambridge University Press, October 2021. Excellent. We'll put a link in the notes. Okay.

Okay. Thank you so much, John. Okay. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit ThegreatSimplification.com for more information on future releases.