The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The 7 Things That Scare Me Most | Frankly #38

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

In this week's Frankly, Nate expands upon something he finds himself saying more frequently these days; "what scares me the most is…".  From the likelihood of nuclear war to how our human in/action harms innocent animals, Nate opens up about his personal list of deepest fears. Contrasting his childhood fear of [harmless] spiders against his current fear of humans' propensity towards [what is now existential] apathy as we face the metacrisis, Nate reminds us how much more complex our lives are in 2023. Can we be courageous and face our own fears head on, rather than feeling paralyzed by them?  For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/38-the-7-things-that-scare-me-most Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psWmpCOvvmg&t=2s  

Greetings. I've got a part two on the, how would society actually stop or reduce oil or more broadly stop economic growth, but it's turned out to be a little bit involved, and I want to have my new AI animator add some contributions. So that probably would be next week. I caught myself yesterday talking to a friend saying, you know what scares me most? And I realized I say that a lot. You know what scares me most is? And I complete that sentence many different ways. So today I thought I would do a very quick reflection on seven things that actually scare me the most. I'm sure all of you, almost by definition of tuning into this channel, are aware of many of the challenges facing society, facing our friends. facing our planet, facing the natural world.

In coming years, decades, centuries, millennia, and beyond, I think you would all have different answers to what are the three, four, five, six things that scare you. And these change over time, because 20, 30 years ago, I clearly would have said spiders. and why I long for those days, right? Where we would be scared by something as simple and as harmless, as a spider.

So this is personal to my unique worldview and temperament and personality, but these are pretty much the seven things that, that scare me. So number seven, and they're in no order, really. This is kind of out the top of my head. I just jotted them down 20 minutes ago. And you won't be surprised to hear this is nuclear war. I think we're not planning a nuclear war,

but it's when giant, powerful, ambitious, hubristic nations play at the global game of risk with large stakes and grain and oil and rare earth minerals and all of a sudden encountering biophysical limits to the trajectory that came before, some sort of mistake, some sort of an escalatory movement of words that move into kinetic and a bomb is exchanged and then another in retaliation. And all of a sudden it is something. that has been suppressed in our consciousness for the last 50 years because it's never happened.

But humans and 13,000 nuclear warheads and time are not a good combination. I don't know what the risks are, but if you consider the risks every single year, I'm in my mid-50s, the odds are reasonable of some sort of a nuclear exchange in my lifetime. This is something I do think about quite a bit. Next, the impact of artificial intelligence on our social discourse, on our ability to learn, on our ability to discern reason and truth. As an educator, I find this very scary, that if we can't adhere to science, at least as a broad brush filter between us and reality, we are totally lost.

And so I do fear, especially with the algorithms and the AI combined with lower attention spans and stress and other things, this is something that scares me because if we can't have a discourse with individual humans and other groups of humans, I think we're lost. Next, and this is a manifestation of my work on the downward causation in our economic system, from the market to the power players, to the institutions, to the individuals. There is nobody driving the bus. Sometimes I wish there was a cabal of evil billionaires plotting the future of society. It's much simpler than that. There's a metabolism of a social species that found a huge amount of fossil sunlight and were burning through it without a plan.

And the game is the plan. And so what scares me is the unbridled, out of control, no one's in charge, momentum of this runaway train fueled by ancient carbon, just running over ecosystems. and the biogeochemical processes of the world, pell-mell on a rail track towards nowhere. What is the ultimate goal? We're just speeding. So the fact that there's no one in control, that there's no governance at a national or international body

that can counter this. I mean, look at Guzschequist. Gutierrez and others talking about equity, talking about climate, talking about growth, they just cannot dent the momentum of the energy-hungry superorganism. And yet we still give lip service to it and think that we can do net zero or something that accomplishes all these goals. But it does scare me that no one's in charge. and at the bottom of that fear is we lack the governance to be able to deal with what's coming.

Another thing that scares me, me personally, is that I don't think that I'm going to die from climate change, but I might die from speaking about climate change. And as events in the world get more departed from what people have been used to, to the last few decades and as things get tougher and things aren't available in stores and international incidents, people will retreat to what's familiar and what's comfortable. And people that are saying uncomfortable truths like I am will be branded as outcast and dangerous to the in-group. And I'm not so much worried about me per se, and of course I am, but I think speaking the truth and science and caring about what's right, especially environmental

concern about other species and other generations of other species is going to seem like a wacko fringe luxury. And in some ways it is. I think the energy surplus has enabled me and people like me to care deeply about the environment because we didn't have to spend 60 hours a week toiling in the fields or whatever. But I do feel that the social contract, as things get tougher, will ostracize people that aren't towing the line of nationalism or economic growth or less taxes or more access to coal, which gives us air conditioning. And that's something that I'm personally afraid of. I'm also afraid of or I envision animals suffering.

There's over a billion dogs on the earth. And I so love dogs. They're among my best friends in the world. And not only dogs, but all the other animals and humans in the future. as they deal with less energy surplus, which allowed for this bounty and ways of living that we have now, and the suffering of animals in the world, and future humans. I mean, only the grandchildren of the richest humans today will be able to afford air conditioning, and their grandchildren won't have air conditioning.

And given where the planet's going, that is something that I'm I can visualize in my head. For some reason, maybe the same way that I look at the outlaw Josie Wales television, a movie with Clint Eastwood, and they have duels and people are shot, and it's like a Western, but then when they spit on the dog and the dog gets hurt, I feel really sad. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because the animals have no say in what's going on. Second to last, I am afraid, I fear at times, that we are already too late and that there is

coming decades and centuries in millennia, that there is runaway warming, and oceans will turn to slime, and there's anoxic oceans, and all the mass extinction stuff. I don't think this is set in motion yet, but we have no way of knowing. That's another part of it, is the tragedy of not knowing. We could be saving the biosphere with our actions in the next 10 years, or it already might be too late. And we will never know, because this will unfold way past our lifetimes. But the thought of this blue-green earth because of what?

one hyper-curious and aggressive and creative primate kind of having its way with the global systems. And what the end game of that looks like to the natural world is something that I am afraid for. And I'm sure many of you following this podcast feel the same way. Lastly, this is actually my biggest fear, and I don't think anyone will expect what I'm about to say, but this actually is my thing that I think about a lot. It's what if all of our education, this podcast, the millions of people around the world that are learning about systems, ecology, and human behavior, and that the best things in life are free after basic needs are met and all the education that is converging on this conciliant view of

where humans came from, how we got here, what we need, what we're doing, what skills and technology and possibilities there are, what we're doing to the natural world and the verge of the six mass extinction, that we're successful in educating lots of humans about all of it. and then people just shrug. Pass me another barbecued chicken and another beer and let's watch Netflix tonight again. And we just, we shrug as a species even in the face of understanding

how we got here and what possible pathways are forward. That scares me more than anything. I don't know if this was helpful at all. This is pretty honest. These are things that do scare me. Back to an interesting analysis next week on post-growth, post-oil pathways. I hope you're all well. Bye-bye.