Such a powerful perspective and one that needs to be shared and heard.
I have one caveat, though.
Psychopathy is not rare; not created by life experience; and not fixable. These people are born this way. They have measurable differences in their frontal lobes. They are incorrigible and they walk among us, like they always have.
I point this out because they position themselves for power, wealth, sadistic control.
I agree, it's not rare. There are bullies at every level, the size of the pond doesn't matter. You are correct about measurable distances of the frontal lobes as well. It's also interesting that science has identified measurable differences in traumatized brains that pass that trauma as a physical change to the next generation. Epigenetics at work.
14 hrs ago·edited 14 hrs agoLiked by Geoffrey Deihl
True.
And if that’s true, there are many more qualifying explanations needed. No one is born pure. The very idea of purity assumes a stance within a physical universe. But the universe doesn’t care about anyone’s stance. It unfolds in response to the regularities of the universe.
We exist within and as a tiny part of the great cascade of energy and matter. We are blessed or burdened with our inheritances.
Within the unfolding, each of us possesses a unique inheritance of highly organized matter (HOM), some of which, as you point out, creates psychopathy but also several other determinators of an individual’s future action. Tiny bits of HOM self-assemble to form larger structures, which form babies who will respond to physically constructed determinators in the future. All the determinators evolved in our ancestors. They enabled the acquisition of the necessities of life within the environment in which they found themselves.
We are all burdened with our inheritance of the words and ideas of our ancestors. At present, those words and concepts are insufficient to explain precisely how we came to be in this situation.
Nature and nurture both count. Nature is constantly adjusting the gene pool without morality, simply passing on the traits that have succeeded and with others destined to fade out. The worst cases — serial murders, may for the most part been unsalvageable, too many aggressive mutations. I recently read in at least one "primitive" culture such individuals are forced to live in isolation from the tribe, but called on in times of war. Unfortunately, I don't think I book linked that particular article.
The words nature and nurture point toward physically different but inextricably entwined aspects of the physical cascade. It strikes me that people usually fail to focus on the physicalness of the physical element of the cascade called nurture. Considering nature and nurture separately introduces confusion. The distinction between the two is entirely in human minds. It is a problematic conceptual burden.
The massive human overpopulation due to our ancestor's jump from their Hunter-Gatherer/pastoral clan/band living lifeways, to sedentary wheat agriculture, has resulted in our massive status (money) hierarchies, in which only sociopaths may succeed. We number 3,000 times more than they did. What could go wrong? Everything?
What could go wrong has become utterly cartoonish. Agriculture gave us opportunity to think, write and create, but also led to the need for organized government and standing armies. Every "advancement" comes at a cost and is rolled out without thinking about the consequences. It looks likely we're not going to catch on in time.
I'm sorry, don't fetishize hunter gatherers and demonize agriculture.
The reality is that human populations have been remarkably stable and slow growing for over 10,000 years. The period of sedentary agriculture.
In 1890 the global population was still only around 1 billion. A number that seems startling small now, but was celebrated as an achievement of progress then.
The EXPLOSION in the human population is the result of modern medicine.
If you were born in 1870 and were male, you might marry 2, 3, even 4 times in your life if you were unlucky and you lost multiple wives in childbirth. You HAD to remarry each time because you needed a wife to care for those children. And each time, pregnancy was a roll of the dice.
Modern medicine put an end to that.
We also appreciate not having to bury half of our children before the age of five. In the 1880's and 90's about 46% of all children died before the age of five. Fevers, infections, and disease were lethal and most families buried multiple children.
That's why the population grew slowly, despite the fact that without birth control women spent their lives being pregnant. My grandmother was one of 23 children. 20 live births and 3 still births. Her mother was married at 16 and basically had a baby every two years until she died. When her oldest daughter's took over raising the younger children.
Because of advances in medicine, 17 of those 20 survived into adulthood. That's where your "population explosion" comes from.
This explosion already shows signs of passing. Having children is EXPENSIVE. It is becoming more and more common in developed nations for couples to have one or two children at the most. Countries like Japan ARE experiencing what can be seen as "controlled" depopulation. Soon the US will be going through the same process.
Ask the Japanese. It's BRUTAL, both socially and culturally. It "feels" like living through the movie "Children of Men". It feels like COLLAPSE.
Sorry, Richard, I don't fetishize humanity over the millions of other life forms we've pushed to the edge of or permanently into extinction. Yes, population density stress is taking over for the myriad 19th century causes of death, but we are still 3,000 times more numerous than were our migratory clan/band living Hunter-Gatherer ancestors. Apparently, you cannot see the handwriting on the bathroom wall. HUMANITY IS A VIRUS, A BACTERIUM AND MOTHER NATURE IS DOING HER LEVEL BEST TO RID HERSELF OF THIS PLAGUE. You seem to have missed the central point of "The Children of Men": population density stress turns off the reproductive potential of an over crowded species. I wrote a book about it with extensive historical documentation, which I give away as a FREE online PDF, "Stress R Us". If you have the nerve, check it out. Just Google the title.
We could have a lengthy debate about this. I get your point and used to argue your "side" with my wife.
I think it comes down to how you view the Australian Aboriginal Culture.
It is BY FAR the oldest continuous culture that humanity has ever produced. It existed virtually unchanged for around 50,000 years.
Now, does that make them an exemplar of "sustainable culture" or an example of "cultural stagnation"?
If you see them as the role model for a sustainable lifeway, is that way of life one you would want to live yourself? Is it the one you would want for your children and grandchildren?
Or, is it a lifeway that you think "other people" should adopt but never expect to have to adopt yourself?
8 billion of us is too many. I agree with that. Even with massive reductions in inequality and with a unified/rational global culture there isn't enough to support us all. However, I don't rejoice at the thought of the coming degrowth. I MOURN it.
There will never be this many humans alive at once again. EVER.
That it's hopeless isn't an answer, just a recapitulation. Do we need recapitulations? None of your readers do. As long as we are breathing we do something. So what else could you do? How about turning your powerful intellect over to that question?
You're right, recapitulation doesn't get anything done, and I'm aware that for the most part I'm preaching to the choir. In terms of action, we have the traditional tools available to us, boycott, strike, march, civil disobedience. I have mentioned them all at one time or another, perhaps that should become a boilerplate piece of copy included in each article.
Changing any of this is going to require people risking bodily harm, incarceration, and lives. Action similar to the Civil Rights movement is necessary. Climate protestors in the UK are receiving five-year sentences for civil disobedience. The police here are paramilitary and exonerated from murder more often than not.
We're not desperate enough to shed blood yet, but that's the bottom line, IMO, and you and my readers are a distinct minority. I'm trying to raise awareness and provide information that spreads beyond what's read here. Every reader is a potential ambassador to enlighten others who don't understand our dire situation.
As the best writers do pieces like this, being a deep ally of yours I'd like to enroll you as a deep ally of mine, looking for what's causal to the insanity that could send us back to the stone age: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/looking-for-a-committee-to-think. Your smart readers are welcome, too.
I won't launch this until have a small cadre of people who are as good as you are, so in the meantime please do a little homework for ideas I've laid out in my Now What? Substack. Here's a summary page that I did a while back for things I was working with up to then: "What's on A ROADMAP TO THE FUTURE? What we-the-people can do": https://substack.com/@suzannetaylor/p-136721961
Suzanne, is it Geoffrey's responsibility to have all the answers? [I see and have followed the link in your next reply. Good luck with your endeavour].
Words matter, even in comments, and he's done the hard work of writing with care, challenging us to face our own lives. Like so many writers here on Substack, he’s exposed his own pain as a call for everyone to wake up. I read each of these articles as a cry to stop passively consuming content. Isn't that enough? Don’t ask him, or anyone else, to be some messiah to follow—that's a dangerous trap that just perpetuates the same insane mess—even if your intent it to lay the foundation for your next message.
Our politics and society are on a crash course with climate change.
The results are probably going to be ugly.
It's relevant to your asking "what to do?" Because I describe what I think is going to happen during "the crash".
Elections have consequences.
Letting Republicans set the climate agenda, letting them block every effort to do anything about climate change, letting them get away with pandering to the climate deniers in their base, letting them do nothing about climate change for the last 20 years also has consequences. This decade, the bill for Republican America’s refusal to admit the reality of CO2 driven Global Warming, is going to come due. When it does, it’s going to reshape our society and our politics.
Here are the main factors converging over the next decade:
It’s going to get hotter.
It’s going to get drier.
It’s going to get hungrier.
The “Great Climate Awakening” is coming fast and it’s going to be wrenching, disruptive, and harsh. At some point this decade the number and size of the Climate Disasters will be undeniable. It will become obvious to everyone but the willfully blind that Global Warming is “really real” and “really bad”. People will finally start to pay attention to the crisis and internalize what it means to them, how it’s going to affect their lives directly.
When they do. When everyone under 40, finally understands how screwed they are and how their future has been stolen. The reaction is going to be extreme.
Watch one of those “the end of the world is coming, and everything falls apart” movies for clues about the societal effects on populations from knowing for certain that “life as we knew it” is over. When everyone, “all at once”, understands that we are going to at least 3C now, and just how bad that’s going to be, people are going to react in a big way. Think suicides in huge numbers, casual murder, hedonism on epic scales, disengagement from the existing economic systems, and above all else, RAGE.
When elites try to suppress social changes to preserve the systems that allow them to be elites, pressure for change inexorably builds. If they can stave off change long enough, paradigm shifts become generational and relatively blood free. The Old Guard dies off and is replaced by new faces.
When circumstances force change before the existing elites are capable of accommodating it. Well, that’s what revolutions and civil wars are all about, isn’t it?
When the Climate Awakening happens later this decade, people under 40, the ones who are going to have to live in the world our climate bomb is creating, are going to be filled with a lot of rage. They are going to burn with righteous anger and a blazing desire to punish the people who did this to them. That rage is going to dominate American and global politics by the end of this decade. 2031 is going to be a vastly different political landscape than 2021.
The climate politics of the late 20’s and early 30’s is going to be harsh and merciless. The young are not going to be forgiving or understanding. I expect trials and televised executions of oil company executives, people like Joe Manchin, those found guilty of ecocide, and anyone else the mob turns their rage on.
Review the French Revolution if you want a sense of what’s coming. Revolutions are sometimes necessary but that one ended with “The Terror” and then Napoleon. Angry vengeful people rarely create stable, functional political structures. They are going to burn the Republican party to the ground and then piss on the ashes.
They are probably going to take over the Democratic party and use it as their vehicle to take power. But make no mistake, they are going to purge the party heavily in the process. It’s not going to be the party it is today. Climate Action extremism is going to be the litmus test of acceptability. They are going to be angry and uncompromising and they are going to remake the party in their image.
Politics in the 30’s is going to be all about Climate Change and the attempts to create a world that can survive it. For the sake of your children and grandchildren you should hope they succeed.
-------------
I don't think you have to DO anything at this point. The CRASH is coming and our societies are going to fundamentally change. The only question now is in what direction?
Such a powerful perspective and one that needs to be shared and heard.
I have one caveat, though.
Psychopathy is not rare; not created by life experience; and not fixable. These people are born this way. They have measurable differences in their frontal lobes. They are incorrigible and they walk among us, like they always have.
I point this out because they position themselves for power, wealth, sadistic control.
They drive the horrors we face.
I agree, it's not rare. There are bullies at every level, the size of the pond doesn't matter. You are correct about measurable distances of the frontal lobes as well. It's also interesting that science has identified measurable differences in traumatized brains that pass that trauma as a physical change to the next generation. Epigenetics at work.
True.
And if that’s true, there are many more qualifying explanations needed. No one is born pure. The very idea of purity assumes a stance within a physical universe. But the universe doesn’t care about anyone’s stance. It unfolds in response to the regularities of the universe.
We exist within and as a tiny part of the great cascade of energy and matter. We are blessed or burdened with our inheritances.
Within the unfolding, each of us possesses a unique inheritance of highly organized matter (HOM), some of which, as you point out, creates psychopathy but also several other determinators of an individual’s future action. Tiny bits of HOM self-assemble to form larger structures, which form babies who will respond to physically constructed determinators in the future. All the determinators evolved in our ancestors. They enabled the acquisition of the necessities of life within the environment in which they found themselves.
We are all burdened with our inheritance of the words and ideas of our ancestors. At present, those words and concepts are insufficient to explain precisely how we came to be in this situation.
That said, our future holds the horrors observed.
Nature and nurture both count. Nature is constantly adjusting the gene pool without morality, simply passing on the traits that have succeeded and with others destined to fade out. The worst cases — serial murders, may for the most part been unsalvageable, too many aggressive mutations. I recently read in at least one "primitive" culture such individuals are forced to live in isolation from the tribe, but called on in times of war. Unfortunately, I don't think I book linked that particular article.
The words nature and nurture point toward physically different but inextricably entwined aspects of the physical cascade. It strikes me that people usually fail to focus on the physicalness of the physical element of the cascade called nurture. Considering nature and nurture separately introduces confusion. The distinction between the two is entirely in human minds. It is a problematic conceptual burden.
Exactly!
Excellent piece.
Thank you, Jan.
The massive human overpopulation due to our ancestor's jump from their Hunter-Gatherer/pastoral clan/band living lifeways, to sedentary wheat agriculture, has resulted in our massive status (money) hierarchies, in which only sociopaths may succeed. We number 3,000 times more than they did. What could go wrong? Everything?
What could go wrong has become utterly cartoonish. Agriculture gave us opportunity to think, write and create, but also led to the need for organized government and standing armies. Every "advancement" comes at a cost and is rolled out without thinking about the consequences. It looks likely we're not going to catch on in time.
I'm sorry, don't fetishize hunter gatherers and demonize agriculture.
The reality is that human populations have been remarkably stable and slow growing for over 10,000 years. The period of sedentary agriculture.
In 1890 the global population was still only around 1 billion. A number that seems startling small now, but was celebrated as an achievement of progress then.
The EXPLOSION in the human population is the result of modern medicine.
If you were born in 1870 and were male, you might marry 2, 3, even 4 times in your life if you were unlucky and you lost multiple wives in childbirth. You HAD to remarry each time because you needed a wife to care for those children. And each time, pregnancy was a roll of the dice.
Modern medicine put an end to that.
We also appreciate not having to bury half of our children before the age of five. In the 1880's and 90's about 46% of all children died before the age of five. Fevers, infections, and disease were lethal and most families buried multiple children.
That's why the population grew slowly, despite the fact that without birth control women spent their lives being pregnant. My grandmother was one of 23 children. 20 live births and 3 still births. Her mother was married at 16 and basically had a baby every two years until she died. When her oldest daughter's took over raising the younger children.
Because of advances in medicine, 17 of those 20 survived into adulthood. That's where your "population explosion" comes from.
This explosion already shows signs of passing. Having children is EXPENSIVE. It is becoming more and more common in developed nations for couples to have one or two children at the most. Countries like Japan ARE experiencing what can be seen as "controlled" depopulation. Soon the US will be going through the same process.
Ask the Japanese. It's BRUTAL, both socially and culturally. It "feels" like living through the movie "Children of Men". It feels like COLLAPSE.
Sorry, Richard, I don't fetishize humanity over the millions of other life forms we've pushed to the edge of or permanently into extinction. Yes, population density stress is taking over for the myriad 19th century causes of death, but we are still 3,000 times more numerous than were our migratory clan/band living Hunter-Gatherer ancestors. Apparently, you cannot see the handwriting on the bathroom wall. HUMANITY IS A VIRUS, A BACTERIUM AND MOTHER NATURE IS DOING HER LEVEL BEST TO RID HERSELF OF THIS PLAGUE. You seem to have missed the central point of "The Children of Men": population density stress turns off the reproductive potential of an over crowded species. I wrote a book about it with extensive historical documentation, which I give away as a FREE online PDF, "Stress R Us". If you have the nerve, check it out. Just Google the title.
We could have a lengthy debate about this. I get your point and used to argue your "side" with my wife.
I think it comes down to how you view the Australian Aboriginal Culture.
It is BY FAR the oldest continuous culture that humanity has ever produced. It existed virtually unchanged for around 50,000 years.
Now, does that make them an exemplar of "sustainable culture" or an example of "cultural stagnation"?
If you see them as the role model for a sustainable lifeway, is that way of life one you would want to live yourself? Is it the one you would want for your children and grandchildren?
Or, is it a lifeway that you think "other people" should adopt but never expect to have to adopt yourself?
8 billion of us is too many. I agree with that. Even with massive reductions in inequality and with a unified/rational global culture there isn't enough to support us all. However, I don't rejoice at the thought of the coming degrowth. I MOURN it.
There will never be this many humans alive at once again. EVER.
It was a remarkable time to be alive.
Sorry, Richard, but you and I live on different planets. Maybe pour paths will cross again when speed of light travel is perfected, but not until.
So, now what?
That it's hopeless isn't an answer, just a recapitulation. Do we need recapitulations? None of your readers do. As long as we are breathing we do something. So what else could you do? How about turning your powerful intellect over to that question?
You're right, recapitulation doesn't get anything done, and I'm aware that for the most part I'm preaching to the choir. In terms of action, we have the traditional tools available to us, boycott, strike, march, civil disobedience. I have mentioned them all at one time or another, perhaps that should become a boilerplate piece of copy included in each article.
Changing any of this is going to require people risking bodily harm, incarceration, and lives. Action similar to the Civil Rights movement is necessary. Climate protestors in the UK are receiving five-year sentences for civil disobedience. The police here are paramilitary and exonerated from murder more often than not.
We're not desperate enough to shed blood yet, but that's the bottom line, IMO, and you and my readers are a distinct minority. I'm trying to raise awareness and provide information that spreads beyond what's read here. Every reader is a potential ambassador to enlighten others who don't understand our dire situation.
Sorry, Suzanne, I don't have any magic answers.
As the best writers do pieces like this, being a deep ally of yours I'd like to enroll you as a deep ally of mine, looking for what's causal to the insanity that could send us back to the stone age: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/looking-for-a-committee-to-think. Your smart readers are welcome, too.
I won't launch this until have a small cadre of people who are as good as you are, so in the meantime please do a little homework for ideas I've laid out in my Now What? Substack. Here's a summary page that I did a while back for things I was working with up to then: "What's on A ROADMAP TO THE FUTURE? What we-the-people can do": https://substack.com/@suzannetaylor/p-136721961
Suzanne, is it Geoffrey's responsibility to have all the answers? [I see and have followed the link in your next reply. Good luck with your endeavour].
Words matter, even in comments, and he's done the hard work of writing with care, challenging us to face our own lives. Like so many writers here on Substack, he’s exposed his own pain as a call for everyone to wake up. I read each of these articles as a cry to stop passively consuming content. Isn't that enough? Don’t ask him, or anyone else, to be some messiah to follow—that's a dangerous trap that just perpetuates the same insane mess—even if your intent it to lay the foundation for your next message.
A couple of years ago I wrote this piece.
On Politics: War by Other Means 02
https://smokingtyger.medium.com/on-politics-war-by-other-means-02-8abb8b5a1113
Our politics and society are on a crash course with climate change.
The results are probably going to be ugly.
It's relevant to your asking "what to do?" Because I describe what I think is going to happen during "the crash".
Elections have consequences.
Letting Republicans set the climate agenda, letting them block every effort to do anything about climate change, letting them get away with pandering to the climate deniers in their base, letting them do nothing about climate change for the last 20 years also has consequences. This decade, the bill for Republican America’s refusal to admit the reality of CO2 driven Global Warming, is going to come due. When it does, it’s going to reshape our society and our politics.
Here are the main factors converging over the next decade:
It’s going to get hotter.
It’s going to get drier.
It’s going to get hungrier.
The “Great Climate Awakening” is coming fast and it’s going to be wrenching, disruptive, and harsh. At some point this decade the number and size of the Climate Disasters will be undeniable. It will become obvious to everyone but the willfully blind that Global Warming is “really real” and “really bad”. People will finally start to pay attention to the crisis and internalize what it means to them, how it’s going to affect their lives directly.
When they do. When everyone under 40, finally understands how screwed they are and how their future has been stolen. The reaction is going to be extreme.
Watch one of those “the end of the world is coming, and everything falls apart” movies for clues about the societal effects on populations from knowing for certain that “life as we knew it” is over. When everyone, “all at once”, understands that we are going to at least 3C now, and just how bad that’s going to be, people are going to react in a big way. Think suicides in huge numbers, casual murder, hedonism on epic scales, disengagement from the existing economic systems, and above all else, RAGE.
When elites try to suppress social changes to preserve the systems that allow them to be elites, pressure for change inexorably builds. If they can stave off change long enough, paradigm shifts become generational and relatively blood free. The Old Guard dies off and is replaced by new faces.
When circumstances force change before the existing elites are capable of accommodating it. Well, that’s what revolutions and civil wars are all about, isn’t it?
When the Climate Awakening happens later this decade, people under 40, the ones who are going to have to live in the world our climate bomb is creating, are going to be filled with a lot of rage. They are going to burn with righteous anger and a blazing desire to punish the people who did this to them. That rage is going to dominate American and global politics by the end of this decade. 2031 is going to be a vastly different political landscape than 2021.
The climate politics of the late 20’s and early 30’s is going to be harsh and merciless. The young are not going to be forgiving or understanding. I expect trials and televised executions of oil company executives, people like Joe Manchin, those found guilty of ecocide, and anyone else the mob turns their rage on.
Review the French Revolution if you want a sense of what’s coming. Revolutions are sometimes necessary but that one ended with “The Terror” and then Napoleon. Angry vengeful people rarely create stable, functional political structures. They are going to burn the Republican party to the ground and then piss on the ashes.
They are probably going to take over the Democratic party and use it as their vehicle to take power. But make no mistake, they are going to purge the party heavily in the process. It’s not going to be the party it is today. Climate Action extremism is going to be the litmus test of acceptability. They are going to be angry and uncompromising and they are going to remake the party in their image.
Politics in the 30’s is going to be all about Climate Change and the attempts to create a world that can survive it. For the sake of your children and grandchildren you should hope they succeed.
-------------
I don't think you have to DO anything at this point. The CRASH is coming and our societies are going to fundamentally change. The only question now is in what direction?
I liked the article both the art and the discussion itself.
You might enjoy this piece I wrote and rerun every year around Thanksgiving.
055 - Thanksgiving Edition.
https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/substack-index
Thanksgiving is an American Holiday. It should be an International Day of Remembrance. A day to think about what was lost. (11/23/23)
It talks about how we rewrite history to suit ourselves all the time.
Also, a HUGE Magritte fan.