The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Quiet Part Out Loud | Frankly #13

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

Of all the challenges facing our culture, the fact that humans use social sorting mechanisms to solve physical world problems looms as perhaps the greatest. This Frankly is a reflection on the possibility of sharing a socially unpalatable message to a large percentage of citizens and leaders. Our vertical and horizontal social infrastructure isn't built to process, share and address challenges of this magnitude - but instead to ignore, water down, and mitigate. Will the quiet part be spread out loud to large amounts of humans as The Great Simplification becomes more obvious? Or will the quiet part be socially squashed a la George Orwell? Of course I have particular interest in this question, and its resolution. Time is moving very fast… For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/13-the-quiet-part-out-loud To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK02HnurhM8

Greetings, good humans. Recently, this week, I have a friend who is pushing me to go to Davos in January to speak at the World Economic Forum. She thinks that the time is now to say the quiet part out loud to elites and the movers and shakers. because the truth that followers of this podcast and my work over the last 15 years already know is starting to percolate more into those spheres. And I would like to talk this week's, frankly, about my reaction to that, about saying the quiet part out loud on the highest, stages of the world. My first reaction was, I don't want to fly in January to Europe with COVID and passports and airports and cabs and long lines and not my bed and my dogs. My second reaction was this is my cross to bear and I've been connecting this story for 20 years and I've been. I've

should be passing it up to people that have more influence and ability to shift the future. And that is my role to play. My third reaction was fear because I think there's a lot of well-intentioned humans at these meetings, but this is kind of the people that will dig in their heels for a match. massive culture change that I expect is coming. And I will like them because I like a lot of people once I meet them and I will befriend them and then slowly the essence of my message gets watered down so that it's palatable for this, that, or the other demographic.

So I had that reaction. But then I thought about what would I say? What is the quiet part? And it's pretty simple, isn't it? We are part of an economic system that is completely based on drawing down ancient sunlight to the tune of 500 billion plus or minus human labor equivalents. Our stories say that this is interest and pairs with technology, but it really is drawing down the principle.

We have great technology, but technology isn't the answer to. to an ecological problem of overshoot. Since I've been alive, we've lost 70% of the populations of animals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Renewable technology can power a great civilization, which is what I'm aiming for, but not this civilization. And we've used finance to keep away these ugly truths and borrow. from the future to consume at today's level for a while longer.

The quiet part says that our 19 terawatt global economy, 190 billion light bulb equivalence of energy constantly is going to have to decline to fewer, possibly significantly fewer in the not too distant future. So that is the quiet part. Part of the problem is that humans use social sorting mechanisms to solve physical world problems. We don't hear those facts and break them down like a robot and come up with a plan. We look to people around us. So there are two scales by which this happens. One is vertical and one is horizontal. On the vertical scale, we are each part of memetic tribes to the far left,

to the center, all the way to the right. And these tribes, especially with modern social media and algorithms, speak largely to each other. So in these tribes, a renewable energy tribe or a climate change activist tribe, we can speak the truth out loud and very articulate and loudly in extreme voices. They will hear it. But outside of our tribe, they don't hear it. So We can say the quiet part out loud, but most people won't listen on this vertical scale. The other issue is on a societal level, we are incredibly social creatures. And the smokefield room study, 75% of people would alert someone in authority if they saw smoke coming through their door. But if two other Confederates in the room ignored the smoke, then the number of people reporting there was smoke under the door dropped from 75 to 10%.

So our ancestral environment was we passed information up into the tribe and the tribe got agitated or didn't get agitated. If it didn't react, then there must not have been the problem. And that is the case with so much of our social discourse. These podcasts and other people talking about are at the end of growth and what a post-growth economy is going to need to look like, or a really small kind of echo chamber because it's not being told on the media. It's not in the movies. It's not by our politicians. So there is this, it doesn't stick on a vertical discourse.

Sorry, I just said that all wrong. That was the horizontal way. On the vertical way, we have glass ceilings on what we are able to communicate. So on a vertical discussion of the quiet part, it's based on power and wealth and popularity. And we immediately look, oh, this person just sent us a YouTube video. Did that person have 30 followers or 2 million? Well, if it's 2 million, it must be something worthwhile. If it's only a couple hundred followers, why should I pay attention to this person?

That's one aspect. The other aspect is when we get to high-level meetings like Davos or just a funding meeting or a government cabinet meeting or any kind of social gathering, humans tend to defer to the highest-ranking woman or man in the room. because we can speak the truth to ourselves. Actually, I would speak 90% of the truth to myself because I'm human, therefore, I have some delusions that I'm not aware of. I can tell 70% of the truth to my brother or my girlfriend

because they know me really well, but I know they're foibles and don't want to upset them. I can speak 50% of my truth to social gathering of my friends because one of them just had a family tragedy and I don't want to bring up some of this stuff. As we increase the number of people, the amount of truth that we're able to say diminishes. So if you can imagine the prime minister of France or the president of the United States speaking to millions, it becomes a popular sort of filter where the least common denominator ends up watering down the quiet part. in a big way.

So I think to actually state that growth is ending and that technology is not going to, on its own, solve what we face really can't be said at a place like Davos. I could be wrong about that, but perhaps we are approaching a time where we may wish for more time before the quiet part of stated out loud. Because there could be a phase shift. Imagine if billions of humans understood what the people following this podcast do. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? The way I see it is there is an Orwellian story here,

which is that Big Brother and authoritarianism movements are going. going to eventually control what we're able to say, what we're able to do. And in contrast to that is the Eldus Huxley story, which is that we actually will prefer that. We will want to have someone giving us soma or distraction or bread and circuses. And we will like to be controlled because we no longer are able to think for ourselves. Of course, my philosophy and my My ethos and why I'm doing this work is I would like a third path, which is that we can, as individual humans, have self-actualization, understand the science of what we face, and collectively move forward using reason and empathy.

If I had to summarize the goal of my work, it's to inform. to invite and to inspire. And I have a feeling that if I did go to Davos and said this message, I would inform and then run like hell. So I'm still kind of on the fence whether to scale this message broadly, indiscriminately, because there is a huge difference between the great simplification and the great reset probably the only commonality is the word great.

So these are things I think about. And yet, and yet, the Prime Minister of France last week talked about energy sobriety, the fact that French citizens are going to have to or should. She's inviting them to use 10% less energy. Turn the lights off after you leave the room, drive your cars slower to conserve gas, all advertising signs have to be turned off at night. And this is not because she is anticipating what's coming in the future. The crisis has arrived on the door in France, in Germany, in Europe.

And we should be using this as a dry run to learn what's happening. Because this is happening. This is coming for us. This is coming for everyone. the quiet part is we're going to have to use less. It's kind of crappy to say out loud, but it's the truth. So that is my quick, frankly, reflection on the quiet part out loud. And have a good weekend, everyone.

I'll talk to you next week. Thank you.