The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Solutions that can be Named are not the Solutions | Frankly #67

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Recorded July 23 2024   In this week's Frankly, Nate addresses the common desire for solutions to the human predicament - and why the championing of "solutions" is less clear-cut than we might perceive. To this end, he offers a three-dimensional model for thinking about a framework for responses.   Effective responses greatly depend on the context of an individual - by highlighting specific 'solutions' we narrow the scope of the conversation and exclude creative and empowered humans with different interests and skills.    Additionally, much like nature, the human socio-economic system is adaptive, and rapidly self-adjusts to new information and threats, making novel strategies difficult to implement and disperse at larger scales. As such, simplistic answers that can be publicly shared with millions are probably not going to work. If we zoom out, we see that responses with the potential to shift our systems in a better direction are only possible through emergent processes and may not be able to be championed publicly for a variety of reasons.    How can we expect to steer towards more humane futures by approaching The Great Simplification with the same 'quick-fix' mindset enabled during the Carbon Pulse? What is the role of critical leadership and governance that will be needed in coming decades but is perceived as too radical today? How can we, as both individuals and communities, think about our distinct place within the larger world and how that might shape our unique responses?  YouTube Link here   For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/67-the-solutions-that-can-be-named-are-not-the-solutions   Support Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners        

Go Wei Pengio, Dajajajal. That's a very polite way to say greetings in Chinese. You know, it would be great, as an aside, to have someone from China on the show to discuss the metacrisis and how China is thinking about and facing some of these things. So last week, I had a frankly called the Reality Party. It was really my frustration looking at both parties in the United States, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere in the world, not really talking about the core issues that we're going to be facing in the coming decade. And some of the feedback I got is what would a reality party stand for? What would be the solutions to the human predicament?

What would be the policies that we would put forward? And today I want to talk about that and talk about specifically why I am not promoting certain solutions to what we face, at least not yet. And that is going to be the subject of today's, frankly. Okay, so brief recap, the human predicament. We are supported by ancient sunlight and treating it as if it were interest. We currently have a 20-terawatt, a 19-some-terawatt global human metabolism, which is around 190 billion light bulbs worth of energy turned on 24-7. That is impacting the biosphere in its waste absorption capacity. We're overlaying this with monetary claims that continue to grow.

We're in ecological overshoot. Climate change is just one of many risks to the environment, including novel entities and plastic and Phaas and species loss, et cetera. It's my belief and my 20 years of research has led me to believe that from 19 terawatts, we will hit 15 terawatts before we hit 25 terawatts. And we have a lot of things to do between, now and then to make the future better than the default. On top of all that is the evolved human behavioral constraints and predilections of

modern homo sapiens. So with that as the general problem statement, and there's 200 hours of content on this site that unpackes the statements I just made, with that as a general problem statement, what are the solutions? What are the policies? What should we do? So first I would, as I said last week, there are no solutions, right? There are solutions to a problem.

What we face is a predicament. And predicament there are responses and things that would make it better than the default. So I really don't like talking about solutions, but it's quite a common word. So how do we think about solutions mitigation to, what I call the human predicament or the Great Simplification. Okay, so first of all, the responses to the Great Simplification are not simple. They are complex. So, first of all, the categories of the interventions would fall into three broad areas.

One would be using Marvin Harris' framework, the superstructure, which is the ideas and the values and the beliefs and the memes and the stories. and the narratives. Another category would be the structure or what Daniel Schmachtenberger and I have started to refer to as the social structure, which is our laws and our rules and our economic ways of transacting goals, et cetera. And underneath that is, of course, the infrastructure, which is our energy, our systems, our buildings, our environmental waste capacity, and all those things. So if we talk about solutions, which of those categories are we referring to? And then to put this in a two-dimensional space, those of you listening, those paying attention

to the future, care about different scales. There's the individual scale. There's the local and regional scale. There's the national and global scale. And then to make it three dimensional, there's the time aspect, which is the pre-crisis time, which is now to whenever there is a financial or geopolitical cascade, which could be very soon, or we could have a decade before that happens. That moment, I call the bend versus break moment, is how do we stabilize the system and keep it going?

at a less complex smaller scale. And then the third timeline is 20 years from now, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, what are the technologies, ways of living with each other and with nature, governance models, et cetera, for the longer term. So that's kind of a three-dimensional view of how we might think about the solution space. But then if we even took one of those cubes, we could extrapolate it even wider, there are different sorts of people. Of course, the world has 8 billion people in wildly different circumstances, but even the people watching this show,

they might have a lot of resources or no resources. They might have a lot of social capital and friends and networks or just be by themselves in their off-the-grid home in British Columbia or something. So people's circumstances, high to low, also people might be living in a different culture that is not fully complexified. There's the global north where I live near Minneapolis, things are incredibly complex. But also, I gave a presentation last week to a bunch of NGO leaders in India. India has not yet fully complexified, which is an advantage to them. So the options available to someone living in India is to kind of resist the siren song of conspicuous consumption in the global north.

And they have actually less degrees of freedom on the climate standpoint, but more degrees of freedom on how they organize things. And lastly, in this second Rubik's Cube is what you care about. A lot of listeners to this show care about other species and Earth's ecosystems and future generations. Others just care about social justice and inequality. Others care about local resilience and the economy where they live. So all of these things make it clear that there isn't a one-size-fits-all recommendation to people in the world are viewers of this program. So one of the things that I feel strongly about and the purpose that I'm, the reason I'm doing this, this work is I think we have to

avoid, have more people avoid being captured by wrong narratives that are dead ends. So in the sequence of being ecology systems and energy blind, the very first step, and it is the most important step, is to understand what's going on, to understand how energy, money, technology, and economic growth fit together, how we do these things to get the same neurotransmitters of our successful ancestors and how this whole system has an environmental impact. That takes a lot of time, but it's very important to understand. And this is politically neutral. It doesn't matter who you vote for or what your value system is at this point.

Just to understand it is integration of science, and no one including me knows all this stuff, but we're all learning and headed in that direction to understand the present. Because as my former guest, Ed Conway said, we have to understand the present to understand the future and we don't. Beyond that, once we understand, that's when your values come in. What do you care about? What do you feel? What is important to you? People that have followed me for 20 years or the last couple of years in this podcast know I deeply care about the natural world and the one and a half to two million known species and the up to 10 million unidentified species that have no say in our economic system. And I want to

chaperone them as best as possible through the bottlenecks of the 21st century. I've concluded that we have to also help human systems navigate this bender break in order for that to happen. So that's my value system. That comes across, I think, in my podcast, but it's secondary for the work to have people understand what's going on. Then downstream from understanding and caring about something is the plans and the responses and the solution set and to figure out what your strategy is. And then downstream from that is engaging and executing your strategy.

By far the most important thing on this podcast is the understanding. And I'm going to continue to say why I'm not going whole hog into the solutions, but this is one reason why. Another reason why is as soon as you have a specific solution, you have narrowed your audience dramatically. For instance, I've come up with, and I will be articulating this later this summer. many categories of interventions. There's regenerative agriculture and technology. There's what I call the real energy transition, which isn't transitioning to a type of energy. It's a transition on how we use energy and interact with others and with our local ecosystems. There's Goldilocks technology, not too hot, not too cold, just right for a lower throughput future. There's advanced policy.

There's a new framework for philanthropy, which I may call capital in the service of life. There's different governance models. There's libraries of healing. These are all general categories. But once you get more specific than that, what if your audience is an engineer or a teacher or a celebrity or a college student or a college professor or a philanthropist or a farmer? There's different answers for each of those categories. Okay, another reason I don't talk about solutions is a delicate one. And I probably could say a lot more about this, and I probably will already say too much.

Human systems, the way we have a shared mind space around the world with the 8 billion humans or at least the billions that are connected to the internet. Technology has accentuated this. This mind space functions very similar to systems in nature. And there are adaptive systems, adaptive processes. There's a predator prey like relationship and things move very fast. To give a natural system analog, there are bivalves, which are like mollusks and clams. And the thickness of their shell is based on the predators around them that would be able to crush the shell. And if there are no predators that have strong jaws in their environment, they don't need to grow thick shells. Growing the thick shells is a waste of energy and resources. They only do that in

response to things. And it's the same thing in human systems. You know, Bucky Fuller famously said, you can't change the existence system. By fighting it, you have to create a new system that makes the old system obsolete. He didn't believe that. He was a military contractor that did the do lines in the Arctic for the domes to protect the ICBM nuclear missiles. He was the contractor for those domes. He couldn't come out and say, you know, fight the existing system because then there would have been an immediate adaptive response to that and he would have, you know, lost status and the voice. voice that he had. Countless examples like that. 9-11, no one knew that you could hijack planes.

Osama bin Laden figured it out, and it was adaptive response. But the response in counter to it happened really fast because I think it was the third plane. On their cell phones, people knew that they were doing this. So they no longer allowed that to happen. And the passengers attacked the pilots and that's why the plane didn't hit the White House. So all of the information out there is very quickly adapted to and responded to. And so the real solutions to the metacrisis will not be televised and they will not be popular either. So it's good to talk about the framework that we face. And so people don't buy dumb narratives like net zero by 2050 with continued economic growth. But it will never be a thing that the solution set to the meta crisis is outlined

publicly. And a subset of that, that's not the adaptive nature of it, is the universe of socially acceptable solutions. And then there's a universe of effective, solutions and how much that overlap is is probably not huge. So and then on top of that, we've got climate change and economic growth and poverty and inequality and biodiversity and all these concentric circles. There's some overlap with some of them, but there's no overlap of all of them. And how do we manage for that? A deeper, more tangible example of this adaptive.

ceiling that I mentioned. I've been blessed with this podcast to come across a lot of humans who are working on fantastic things. I met someone recently who is working on existing language that when a wetland gets bulldozed over for a new Walmart or something, that community has to procure a new wetland somewhere in the world. And this person is, is working on the language to make that scalable in all communities in Canada and the United States. Another person I know has individually conserved millions of acres in South America of biologically sensitive land. These people, I want to highlight them on the podcast, not to say, hey, go do this,

but to say, hey, wow, look at all these things that can be done, but they don't want to come on the podcast because if they explain what they're doing, that creates an adaptive counter response from people that don't share their values and don't want those things to happen. So it actually causes their special sauce to dissipate. The one example that I have had on the show is my colleague and friend DJ White, one of the early Greenpeaceers and the founder of Earth Trust. He successfully stopped the only drive kill of dolphins in history. It's over 30 years ago.

And I think the reason he shared why he did it and how he did it is because all the people in the Taiwanese government that were involved in that, which he wasn't allowed to tell anyone, that was part of the agreement, are no longer alive. The point is that there will be an in-service-of-life underground movement. There will be things going on that are responses. and mitigations to the problems we face that no one knows about. And hopefully some of you listening to this will do that. That leads me to policy.

What are the policies that knowing about the human predicament and the great simplification we could do? Well, on the surface level, there's some generic policies that would just generally be good ideas, like term limits or age limits or getting the money on. of politics, but most of the things that I'm talking about are not only in the future, but to avoid these things from happening, the policies that we're voting for are exactly the opposite direction. So one of the things that I started a couple of years ago, and I've spoken to around 25 senators,

governors, congressmen, is the concept of advanced policy, which is those things that we will have to do in the coming decade, but that are socially and political, political to advanced to be accepted by the current political zeitgeist, but we still need to do them, to build research, to do scenario planning, to build constituency, to create break glass plans. I did some of that with some agencies of the U.S. government back in 2014, but those aren't online, obviously because talking about them makes them become self-fulfilling prophecies or removes their potential effectiveness. This is a long way of saying that solutions aren't going to just be listed one, two, three, and followed linearly. I think the last reason that I don't talk about

solutions is probably the most salient one, which is truly I don't know. I think it's clear to you all what I care about. I am learning along with you. It's one of the blessings of unexpected blessings of this podcast is I've come across so many really smart, caring people who share my value systems and I'm learning along with you. And so, you know, if you go to a doctor and you're sick, the doctor will diagnose you and give you a pill or do a surgery. If you go to an auto mechanic and he or she will tell you what's wrong with your car and then they'll fix it. Describing the great simplification doesn't qualify me or anyone to then know what to do. I'm trying to describe it. And it's my hope that there is a collective learning and a change in the

conversation that creates emergent ideas, emergent responses. So my main goal now is to paint the picture as clearly as I can myself and then get different aspects, different angles of it from my guests. To further complicate things is we don't know what future is going to arrive. There could be the AI, more boost in productivity, more door economy where we have more growth and more environmental impact. There could be the great simplification, this financial Wiley Coyote moment I've been talking about, or there could be a collapse.

So how do we plan for those scenarios? I, at this point, don't think that I'm trying, I mean, although pro-social prepping is one of the categories I think is important, this isn't just a prepping channel. There are other ones that exist and based on how my farm looks. you don't want to use me as an example on how to prep. I'm still trying to save the whole, you know, social system in a way that we can go to a kinder, gentler, more sapient economy that includes the other species and the value of ecosystem services into our value system.

So I'm still trying to breathe life into that vision. And I hope this answers questions that none of you even had. Actually, this feels important to me to describe what I'm trying to do and why a solution for the metacrisis is kind of a unicorn or a carrot. And the reality is that's not how the world works. I have a very intense personal, frankly, hopefully on deck for next week about my family. So until then, woman-zai-jianba. Talk to you next week. Bye-bye.