The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - One Ring to Rule Them All | Frankly #45

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

In this Frankly, Nate refers to a favorite timeless book series, The Lord of the Rings, to describe 'the nine rings for mortal men' - behavioral tendencies that are common among humans based on our evolutionary nature but become counterproductive within modern culture. These traits drive the growth of the Superorganism through 'one ring to rule them all', the amassing of power and the synergy of agricultural surplus, fossil energy, money, and Artificial Intelligence. Can this out of control power dynamic be broken and redirected away from the influence of the One Ring?  Will we have the courage and wisdom to stop our drive to amass power as we approach the Great Simplification?   For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/45-one-ring-to-rule-them-all   To Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/zXgIAQZu3I4

One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Greetings. Ooh, theatrics. I am back from traveling. Lots on my mind. Lots going on in the world.

Yes, I am doing another Tolkien reference from Lord of the Rings. I've been putting together an advanced kind of theory of how power is driving humans towards a cliff, quite frankly. So today I'd like to talk about the one ring of power metaphorically from the Lord of the Rings. And before I get to that, I'd like to talk about the nine rings for mortal men, which are behavioral tendencies. of our species, Homo sapiens, that have been successful for 290,000 years in ancestral tribes on the Savannah in Tanzania, Kenya, Africa, but are misfiring in our current globalized, technologically advanced, energy-rich culture. I do periodically get criticism that the content on this channel is derivative of the same themes. And while that's true, the content is derivative of we're animals, we're human, behaviors matter.

The energy and money and growth are this synergy that is pulling humanity forward. and we're impacting ecology and ecosystems of Earth. It's kind of obvious once you see it, and yet if your hair was on fire, I would continue to point out that your hair was on fire until you recognized it. So the nine rings for mortal men. First of all, we're animals, we're primates.

Humans are predators. We don't think about it much. But ancestral times, we coordinated to hunt game. There was an EROI equation there, optimal foraging theory, and today we are hunting using fossil energy to do most of our labor, but we're hunting bargains and we're hunting good investment returns where we invest a little and get a lot. But we are apex predators. That is one of our rings of power. The second is that dopamine in our historical environment was a neurotransmitter that led

to motivation, action, and reward. If we saw some movement by the bushes or some animal in the trees, it would alert us. And so we recognize that salience, that salience led to reward or safety. Today, we get the reward without doing the work. So our evolutionary impulse is misfiring. Not only that, but so many of us have become addicted to dopamine that we don't have a portfolio of other options like storytelling or campfires or sleeping or a dalliance in the bushes that our ancestors had.

So we continue in the dopamine rut. The third ring of power for humans is loss aversion. So in our ancestral environment, if we forego, for gone, forwent, if we at the time forgo a meal or defer something, it would have been consumed by someone else. We were very sensitive to losses, because if we didn't have had something and we lost it a week or two without food and we would die. So a loss in ancestral times on the plains of Tanzania would mean death, which is why today we go through life amassing things and digits in our bank. And when we lose money or lose things, it's like going backwards in a

Avis rental car thing where it says don't back up or your tires will pop. Physiological research shows that a windfall profit of 10%, like going from $10,000 to $11,000 psychically feels a certain amount, but then a simultaneous loss from 11,000 to 10,000 right back to where you're started is a much larger negative feeling. This is part of our behavioral tendencies that losses feel worse than gains. And obviously, you can see the implications that that has in a global debt-fueled over-consumptive, overshot consumption system. The fourth emanates from that is we are very tribal species. For most of our evolutionary past, we lived in small bands of 30 to 200 people, and we never

traveled more than 10 miles or so from where we were born often. we were intensely supportive of our tribe. We coordinated against dangers like predators, and we coordinated against other tribes when there was resource scarcity or territorial conflict, etc. So tribalism and war is part of the nine rings for mortal men. The fifth, again, is we are biological, finite lifespaned creatures. And because of that, even though we have long lifespans relative to most animals, we intensely value the present more than the future. And that in today's era really matters because many of our real big problems are only going to

manifest in the future so we don't seem to care about them. This has been adaptive in the past, but is now maladaptive for the decisions we have to make. The sixth is groupthink. We are such a social species. We look to others to confer support and approval for what we're saying. And this has gone haywire in a social media age where people can find whatever they believe in supported online. It leads to populist thinking, the consensus trance.

It leads to narratives that are counter to what the media and the general zeitgeist says, being threatening, being canceled, et cetera. So we are a species that really looks to others for approval. The seventh is we don't like uncertainty because uncertainty takes up some of our emotional bandwidth. Because of that, when we hear a scientific or a true story, we only believe that if the truth helps our fitness. If the fitness isn't served or our perception of our fitness, we tend to disregard the truth, which is why there are dueling stories on climate change and nuclear power and resource

depletion and Republicans and Democrats and all these other things, we're easily swayed. towards a narrative that helps our perception of our own situation. Ancestrally, we didn't have all this because things were simple and the every day was pretty much like yesterday, it was pretty much like the year before. But now things are changing so fast that uncertainty is actually uncomfortable. on that and this I have a lot of personal anecdotes on from when I ran the oil drum and I see important people around the world, our species, especially medium to high status males, are incredibly hubristic. And this had its origins in something called dispersal theory and biology.

There was something called a profit phenotype that would go out or be kicked out from a certain tribe and would start a new group elsewhere, like a bigger fish in a smaller pond. The amount of unbelievable confidence of people that know the response to limits to growth, energy, depletion, climate change, biodiversity loss, this is the answer, is a worrisome trait because The truth is there are no easy answers. It's really complex. I don't know what to do, which is why this podcast will never be super popular because I'm never going to be pounding the table that I have a solution or an answer. I am going to pound the table on things that I believe to be scientifically valid. But my point here in this eighth ring of power of humans is hubris and overconfidence. Lastly, we grew up in tandem with nature, but we were at such a small scale that this never was a problem. And today, in order to defend our current consumption habits and the current zeitgeist in the news, anthropocentrism, that humans are above and apart from nature and that were special

is one of the nine rings of mortal men behaviorally. So we have a lot of good traits too. We are kind and we're clever and inventive and altruistic and sharing and funny and artistic and all these things. But these nine things I just mentioned are specifically deleterious to our current social situation. But what they all have in common is they are all enthrall to the one ring, the one ring that binds them, which in our society, not so metaphorically

to the ring of power from the Lord of the Rings, is the synergy, the complex synergy of 10,000 years ago agricultural surplus allowed us to specialize and create hierarchies and eventually create new jobs and chieftains and mayors and nation states. Then fossil surplus, which we had a moonshot, adding hundreds of billions of laborers that the world got effectively a thousand times larger population and consumption versus 500 years ago. On top of that, we overlaid money. The world's reserve currency, which is currently the U.S. dollar, but there are many major currencies. Those are created by banks when they make loans. The interest is not created.

And these are importantly fungible, which means that anyone in the world that has U.S. dollars can instantly turn it into anything. Can turn it into land, can turn it into airplanes, can turn it into houses, can turn it into a company, can turn it into liquid investments, can turn it into solar. social influence. And so as long as we have a fungible currency like that, on the backs of energy surplus, on the backs of agricultural surplus, the tower of Soron continues to like Jack and the Beanstalk creep towards the sky. And it is unstoppable. Now, building on that, shooting it even higher in the sky is artificial intelligence, which increasingly is going to mature. And if you think that the leveraged returns on the natural world from energy are large, and on top of that, the leverage returns of finance on top of energy, now we're going to have the leverage returns

from AI on top of all of it. And even AGI, artificial general intelligence, which leaves out the human in the decision process. Why is this important? I've talked about the superorganism. This is at the beating heart of the superorganism is this quest for power that is mindless and incredibly strong. Mollock, which is a concept that Liv Bore and Daniel Schmachtenberger and others talk about, you could argue is the personality or the temperament of the superorganism. But what ends up happening is people, especially rich humans, have optionality to continue amassing power. And just like the same way that the superorganism culture, our culture, outcompeted those wise, less consumptive, more wide boundary thinking cultures. Those humans that

continue to funnel more and more power have outsized optionality in the future. I met with a billionaire this summer, super good guy, understands my work, understands what's at stake. I asked him to support the organization. Maybe sometime in the future right now, we're invested in liquid equities, and we are growing our portfolio so that we have more money to donate in the future. And I thought that was kind of ridiculous, but now that I think about how all this plays together, the synergy of agriculture, energy, money, and now artificial intelligence are this vortex that is spinning upwards and pulling everything into its wake.

I call this podcast The Great Simplification because I think eventually we won't be able to to have the energy and materials to continue growth. And because we built so many financial claims in order to keep consuming, that is going to spiral downward and we're going to have a great depression sort of thing. It is possible that that is deferred five or 10 years. And I'm going to talk about that next week on how AI interrelates with climate and energy. But in the meantime, this power dynamic is accentuating in a bad way these nine rings of mortal men that I described, these behavioral tendencies for humans.

And I don't know what to do about this until that beating heart at the core of the superorganism, which is fungible reserve currencies on top of energy surplus, accentuated by AI and soon to be AGI. Until that changes, I don't know what can stop it. It is truly Soron. And all I can do is hope that the eye of Soron doesn't turn its gaze to Red Wing, Minnesota. And I can continue to educate people about how these things fit together and come up with off-ramps and guideposts for where to go from here. The one ring, the invisible ring.

Tristan Harris was on my podcast last year and we called the podcast about AI and social media bringing the ring to Mordor. And I thought it was kind of a clever, pithy phrase. But now a year later, I'm like, yeah, that was kind of apt. I'll talk to you next week. Thank you. Bye-bye.