How Many Psychiatrists Does It Take To Change a Lightbulb?
Just one – but it really has to WANT to change.
Change: it’s what you have left over after the folding money is gone. It’s what you do when your clothes are dirty or wet or inappropriate for the evening’s activity. It’s what the I Ching is all about; hence its name “Book of Changes”. It’s what is in the process of happening to our world on a social, psychological, political, economic, existential and just-about-anything-you-can-imagine level. When it is gradual or not much of a deviation from the status quo, it is anything from a slight nuisance to a welcome change – turning the clocks back an hour or eliminating the penny (changing change). When it is massive such as the upcoming world crisis in climate, finance, and living standards, it is difficult and will be fought tooth and nail.
By the way, if I have to convince you that we are in the throes of major climate change, please don’t bother to read any further – it just means I’ll get your piece of cheesecake when the dust settles. If the significantly warmer planet, the severe weather, and the dramatic shrinking of volcanoes and polar ice-caps haven’t convinced you then I certainly won’t.
As well, if you think that the financial woes of the past decade are just an aberrant dip in the continuing rise of the graph of perpetual growth into the stratosphere, then feel free to follow the advice given in the previous paragraph – and I get your cheesecake too.
What is to blame? Well a lot of things, actually, but mainly us. There are just too damn many of us consuming and producing too much. We’re basically blowing through our natural inheritance like every day is Black Friday. We have religions that are anthropocentric which, although they bear lip service to how we should care for all of creation, make it obvious that everything was created for us. Not only that, like in the parable of the talents, we are exhorted to make a profit and, if we do, we are blessed.
We have an economic system called capitalism. We have some systems that denounce capitalism but practice a modified state or theocratic capitalism, the only difference being the number of capitalists. In the past few decades we have evolved a special kind of capitalism called corporatism which makes it easier for capitalists to keep track of their investments. But it’s all about profits and equity and growth. The only trouble is that, like a balloon there is only so much available room for it and there is only so much air to inflate it. If we made contact with an alien civilization we might be able to expand our markets but if they were smart enough to get here they wouldn’t be dumb enough to tie in.
I know that there are probably some heavyweights in economic theory out there who will cringe at my over simplification but I’ve always thought of economists as modern day fortune tellers who don’t derive economic theories but try to force them onto a chaotic world. Of course the ‘schools’ they evolve wind up not working because their founders write up the prescription and then hope the disease will comply for a cure. Like their brothers in the stock market, they tell themselves that what they are doing is sound practice when it is no more than a glorified, albeit very intricate, crap shoot.
We are nearing the end of capitalism, not because it has run out of markets into which it can expand. One can always create new markets by usurping those of others through conquest, wars, or subterfuge. Tear down a Berlin Wall and allow capitalism to enter, concealed in the stomach of the Democracy Trojan Horse. Bomb Iraq back into some modern Stone Age and then build a new nation founded on liberty, justice and a telecommunications market for all. But expanding markets can no longer compensate for the amount of revenue being extracted from the system by the obscenely wealthy and the planet, which is the source of all wealth, cannot sustain the degree to which it is being plundered and abused. In short, Earth can no longer (and never could) slake the thirst of Capitalism and the greed upon which it is predicated.
What does that mean for you and me? Thirty years ago I was telling anyone who cared to listen that, unless we were all willing to live at the consumer level of a Portuguese peasant, we could not survive into any sort of longitudinal future. I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford that kind of luxury any more. I’m not sure we can buy a future for our children’s children at any price. Our world was a collision of long odds, stacked upon the incredible, and dangling from the impossible. What we inherited was a beautiful gift from probability that was as complex as it was fragile because complexity is, almost by definition, fragile. And when complex systems begin to fail, the problems grow exponentially as the failing components fail arithmetically, with ever increasing speed and impact.
But we won’t do anything about it. We can’t. There is so much momentum in the capitalist juggernaut that we won’t stop it until it stops by itself. My former wife and I were talking to groups about pollution forty years ago. Today we have the Tar Sands which are worth, in terms of pollution, a gazillion rolls of the coloured toilet paper we were convincing people to give up. Today we have floating islands of plastic garbage in our oceans. Today we have technology dumps in Africa where children rummage through mountains of obsolete computer parts among toxic components that the countries those computers came from won’t even consider burying in their own land. And that was AFTER the red flags had gone up. The flags can’t get any redder and the number of people who think that human beings can affect climate has actually dropped significantly in the U.S. in the last five years. Look it up!
Change is inevitable; voluntary change is a pipe dream. The majority of the population, once they have achieved a level of wealth and comfort, will not give it up. Whether as an extension of “only if you drop your gun will I drop mine” or “he can afford to give up more than I can because he’s got more than I do” or “I worked so hard for this” or a boatload of other objections, people tend to not only hold on to what they have but want a little more. We are conditioned to acquire and retain. We define ourselves in term of what we have and how much of it we have.
For an undergrad sociology course I took about the same time my former wife and I were telling housewives that it was wrong to coordinate your toilet paper with the bathroom décor, I wrote a paper called, “The Economic Implications of Circumcision”. The thesis of the thing was that both males and females are robbed of a certain degree of sexual potential through surgical and psychosocial intervention – circumcision grabs a good part of the frenulum in males and the clitoris in females (in the west we don’t use sharp objects on women, we just mess with their brains instead). The result is that males engage more industriously in food gathering activities (work) and females increase consumption. The case of females is further complicated by the fact that actual caloric consumption is restricted due to the positing of a slim ideal body form, causing the consumption to be redirected into material goods, namely, shopping.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody stole my idea so I guess it wasn’t that good.
But the fact remains that men (and women these days) spend more and more of their time working at bringing home the bacon and women (and men these days) are consumed by shopping. Whether it’s that little bit of nervous tissue that’s missing or a fantastic job by advertisers to get us to buy things we don’t need, stuff (from automobiles to handbags) is flying off the shelves (or out of the showrooms) faster than the IQ of the average American is falling in relation to his/her BMI.
And, even if you take away the resources that people have to purchase goods, they won’t stop. US household debt has risen from about ten percent of GDP in 1950 to almost one hundred percent today. As people have less and less disposable income, their consumption is actually increasing. Why? Because like any two-pack-a-day smoker will tell you, they’re addicted. Debt feels bad so you buy stuff to make you feel better which increases your debt which makes you feel worse so you buy more stuff to make you feel better.
And you’re going to tell these people that they have to quit cold turkey just for the planet to have a chance of continuing to support ‘advanced’ life? Do you think anything short of a cataclysm of biblical proportion will keep them from their brunch or their new Lexus? Do you think the impending death of the American Dream will cause people to spontaneously and radically alter their definition of purpose in life?
The death of a six hundred year economic model is just another death. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says there are 5 stages of grief. The first stage is denial and that’s what we’re into now. This is followed by anger (which some such as the Occupy Movement have progressed to), bargaining, depression and acceptance in that order. I don’t know if we even have time for all those steps. At the rate that I see things progressing (even movement toward death is a progression) we have, at most, thirty years before the reality of impending planetary extinction looms before us. That may very well be the final change as far as life on earth is concerned. When complex systems fall apart the speed of dissolution is exponential and, rather early in the process, irreversible.
