File: c:/ddc/Angel/BestIntentions/Introduction.html
Date: Sat Jun 05 09:54:54 2010
(C) OntoOO/ Dennis de Champeaux
Introduction
The 21st century has had a tough start with the first decade.
Nine-eleven was a major disruption for which no one wants to pin-down
a succinct label: religious conflict? culture clash? democracy versus
theocracy? Whatever label applies, its impact is still festering with
no end in sight. Finally, the decade yielded economic turmoil through
an amazing sequence of bad judgments by a still growing number of
parties.
We claim that these developments, which have been very visible, mask
"deeper" problematic processes that have been in the works since
the beginning of the 20th century. Actually, the cold war masked
these deeper processes as well to the point that we may accept them
now as normal, semi-natural forces.
The 20th century will keep many experts busy to slice and dice the
many different angles possible. While every century must live with
the inheritance of the preceding one, the 21st century has gotten more
than its fair share ... of precious assets, of horror, of fabulous art
movements, of horrendous depravity, of major Science developments, of
genocides beyond comprehension, of Mother Theresa's compassion, of
Hitler's derangement, of affluence for the masses, of poverty for
other masses, of muddle through democracies, of crash and burn
dictatorships, of well meaning, compassionate sacrifices, of evil,
self-centered, ruthless murdering, of responsible mega corporations,
of plunder the planet companies, of live within your means countries,
of bankrupting countries, ...
This we will all leave for the experts to chew on.
But then there were the people, born, raised, living and dying who are
just there in a great flux of happenings. Their lives were different
dependent on the circumstances of their locations or their lives were
all similarly impacted by the waves going through the decades.
We are getting closer at what we are after in this exploration.
Well, we will not deal with unique individuals, but with the decisions
made by typical individuals as facilitated by slowly expanding
choices.
The roots of these developments are in the 19th century. The US and
the French revolution had expanded rights to larger segments of the
population. Darwin threw cold water on these rights by the notion of
individuals having different abilities to survive.
The 20th century went out of its way to compensate for this
unfairness. Communism proposed that individuals consume according to
their needs and contribute according to their abilities. Other
societies did not go as far but in response they established
entitlements that helped those less able to get by.
These compassionate, well meaning entitlement have done wonders, but
over time their unintended side effects have become, let's say,
questionable. These side effects are what we will look into.
Major entitlements in welfare states make up sizeable segments in
their economies: education and healthcare. These segments are
atypical in that they are consumptive, financed by taxes on all the
other segments. Their fuzzy economic status gives rise to anomalies
that we will dig into.
Current economies are still increasing in complexities, internally
with governments playing an ever-larger role in financial transfers
and externally through globalization. Both of these developments
create new sources of volatility, now leading to worldwide
disturbances. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a major tool used to
guide economies. We will contrast GDP with proposed alternatives as a
lead-in to critique the general use of GDP to measure a society's
well being.
Democracies developed over 200 years ago were designed with calibrated
and balancing forces to compensate for the out of control governments
in preceding centuries. The Press was assigned a role to alert when
the calibrated forces got out of balance and/or when entropy inside or
outside the government endangered "normality". We ponder the eroding
ability of the Press to perform its role.
Democracies carved out during the last two hundred years are
traditionally seen as slowly moving and mostly reactive to unfolding
developments. We will argue that they need an upgrade to fix
loopholes emerging in the preceding centuries and to address
the Tragedy of the Commons that has become a major global destructor.
Why?
"Why this text" is a crucial question for all parties involved. For
us, we wanted to know why reality too often felt unreal - being forced
into a "The Emperor has no clothes on" stance. When we were little we
experienced the luxury of empty beaches. Decades later that luxury
was gone; storm or no storm there are people. Housing developments
during the 20th century in Western Europe (and likely elsewhere,
Japan) were distinctly frightening. Not only that the units were so
small, but also the total 3-dimensional layout was awful. This was
only the beginning of a long string of bewilderments.
Not having any time to keep up with the times prevented having a
closer look at the "emperor situation". Finally we had the opportunity
to look closer at what was going on.
Often one encounters the characterization that a system is "complex".
This can be a fancy manner of running away from investigating a worrisome
situation. Or is simply a (subconscious) smokescreen to hide lack of
knowledge and having no motivation to obtain more insights. The
topics we address are typically complex and sensitive and thus avoided
by those who have a lot to loose in the public arena. Which is why we
should have an independent press as watchdog.
The consequences of unintended side effects turn out to be a major
theme in our deliberations. For example, compassion and altruism are
important values. Helping others in need is crucial to mitigate the
cruel impacts of the human condition. But then we observe that
institutionalized assistance, while doing its beneficial work,
increases slowly over time the need for assistance. This is not an
argument against compassion, altruism and helping others in need, but
it does question the systems that we have developed to deal with
situations that we prefer not to be reminded about and for which we
think it is great that the society has made provisions. We will
consider causal linkages between the different topics that are usually
out of scope for the experts.
How?
We do need to prepare the reader for how we obtain our observations
and how we draw conclusions from them because this text is not simply
a bundle of personal opinions. Physicists go out of their way to
describe their last century findings without using a single formula
because they know that the general public is Math phobic. Similarly,
we know too well that the public has an aversion against numbers and
especially against statistical data because "everyone knows that these
numbers can be massaged for any purpose". If the reader adheres to
this position this text may not be of use. Then there is the
meaning of numbers. If the reader has no emotional response to:
-- The world population grew 4-fold in the 20th century;
-- The world population increased with around 1B in the first decade
of the 21st century
then the reader may not appreciate this text.
If the reader is in a kind of business (as in real estate development)
where the emotional response is unreflectively positive to these two
statements, we doubt again that this text is palatable.
A common fallacy we have encountered is that an unpleasant statistical
observation is attacked by an individual counter example, which then
derails a sequence of arguments. Too often this happens because the
statistical observation reveals something that should not be
the case, as if that is sufficient reason to deny its veracity.
The examples given above are mild in comparison with what we have
dug out of public data. We do give references where
appropriate for those who are confronted with visceral denials.
Obstacles
The material we discuss often leads to heated discussions. Defensive
stances are common along the lines of:
- "Sure, but what you describe has always been the case."
- "That cannot be true (because it would be devastating/ would
eliminate hope/ ...)"
- "So what?"
- "I don't believe it and there is no solution to what you
describe anyway."
- "I believe instead that capitalism/ big business/ the left/
the right/ the immigrants/ the 'others'/ ... is what we have to
fight against."
This list can be extended endlessly. Accusations of being left/
right/ elitist/ etc. and being labeled in general as 'something', all
indicates that we are touching raw nerves.
The question whether we have viable solutions for what we address is
tricky. We describe developments over a period of a century with
deeper historical roots and entrenched stakeholders. Expecting
short-term fixes beyond the general concepts we formulate at the end
is not realistic, but we are happy to be corrected by better minds.
Why again
This text is part of a genre that has trouble to get through. Dennis
Meadows et al [Meadows] has written several books about the 21st
century based on a computer simulation. He and his coauthors get
little traction. The future they find in their simulation looks quite
grim. Jared Diamond's "Collapse" [Diamond] is a massive volume
describing how previous civilizations got into trouble and
disappeared. It is meticulously researched and 'pleasantly' written.
Still, he has virtually no impact on our politicians and our leaders.
Perhaps they are too polite and too academic to be grasped. A
computer simulation has the appeal of a headache and ancient
civilizations disappearing can be easily shrugged off.
This text is more like the dentist drill getting close to the
root. We also are blunt enough to articulate fixes that most others
shy away from.
Where are we?
By now the question must have emerged where we are in the political
spectrum. The real answer is that we are severely worried; and that
we are politically neutral. For those who need to remind us that this
is impossible, we mean that we blame left and right for having created
a world that we are disappointed about, that we do not like, that we
consider unsustainable, that we consider to be dangerously unstable.
That is what this text is about.
References
[Diamond] Diamond, J., "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed", New York: Viking Books, ISBN 1-58663-863-7, 2005.
[Meadows] Meadows, D., J. Randers, & D. Meadows, "Limits to Growth,
The 30-Year Update", Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2004.