The End is just a new Beginning – The Great Simplification
A New Years Resolution on the Last Day of 2023
It’s the last day of 2023: a good time to look backwards so that I can then look forwards. It’s a good day, as I sit here at my cottage overlooking a beautifully frozen lake in the wilds of Quebec, to consider what we know and what we don’t know; to reflect on what is possible and what is not; to reflect on how our knowledge can spur us to talk and to act in ways that can makes our lives worth living.
Like many of you I have tried, and usually failed, to have successful – meaning constructive – conversations with family and friends about the difficult topics that we see as “The Problematique” – that is, the fact that we live in a totally unsustainable civilization that has now shifted from overshoot mode to collapse. Even, or I should say, especially with people who know me well and know, should I ever even dare to suggest a little reading or video on how we are destroying the ecological and biochemical foundations for our lives – guess how far I get? You know the answer. And yet for the few courageous enough to see that this truth, while painful, gives us the possibility – however remote – to find comfort and a path forward, even if that path is bound to be very painful. This quote of C.S. Lewis – one of my favourite writers – describes our current conundrum well:
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end;
if you look for comfort you will get neither
comfort nor truth but only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin,
and in the end, despair.
We at Cacor, after trying for over 50 years to spread the Gospel of Limits to Growth [LTG], while successful in that our message is well known, have not made any substantial change to the status quo. I can say this because we know the global economy is tracking [more or less] the BAU scenario of the LTG model. So that means that industrial civilization as we know it will end. Soon? Could be. Could it be a bit later? Could be. But the fact is that we absolutely on track for it to end. Some, including me, would argue that the social, political, ecosystem/species collapse and climate catastrophe are sure signs that “the end is nigh”. That might be. But change does not necessarily mean collapse. So, as my corny title suggests, isn’t any End just a new Beginning? Could we not help nudge that change from collapse into something else? Another beginning?
What will that beginning be? That is for us to try to choose. We live at a nexus of time where our little choices, because they are the initial conditions for what comes next, could have huge implications for what that future will be – at least according to chaos and complexity theory. Of course nobody, me included, has an idea what that future will be and what the best choices are that we can be making now. But there is a thinker, Nate Hagens, who is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future, host of the Great Simplification podcast, whose approach aligns very much with the quote of C.S. Lewis.
His main idea is simple. Our growth based society cannot possibly continue. It is a system that is becoming more and more complex and more and more reliant on energies that create more and more destruction of human social and natural ecosystems. Not only that, the longer it continues the more of the Earth ecosystem is destroyed and the more toxic our bodies become and the worse our quality of life becomes. So the sooner it ends the better. That will be painful. Horribly painful. He claims that we can choose to simplify rather than complexify our economic, political, cultural systems and especially our personal lives. We can stop taking the addictive drugs of growth and more and immediate gratification to savour and enjoy life to the fullest without more, more, more…. Although the transition, at this late stage of the game, is bound to be ugly. Yet, as C.S. Lewis tells us, better Truth now and comfort later than wishful thinking now and despair later.
Now what does Nate Mean by the Great Simplification? Well, the details are at his website https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/ and the real meat are in his pod casts at https://www.youtube.com/@thegreatsimplification . He even put together a movie! See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4 I first saw him on this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN87PWfj7LA [thanks to Dave Dougherty!], but here is the main idea.
The Great Simplification means devoting our brains to making our energy, physical & social environment, politics & economics, human behavior, and systems science simpler instead of more complicated. It is finding a way of life that does not require growth and that also means humans live within the bio-physical limits given to us on this beautiful, but small, planet. So long story short, The Great Simplification will be the era of the 21st century where we unwind a lot of the complexity built into our system over the last century or two. It doesn’t have to be a disaster, but it’s going to mean a different sort of existence. It’s going to mean less material throughput per average human. On average, instead of the whole pie getting bigger every year, the whole pie of stuff that we, as a nation, as a world, as a species, have access to is going to diminish. And not only that, our relationships with the natural world, our relationships with each other, and our relationships with international trade and the six-continent supply chain that we currently have are also going to change. We are about to transition from the greatest concentration of energy and resources ever amassed on this planet by a species into something different because we cannot continue to grow. So, it’s a simplifying of human interactions and commerce.
Quite honestly, that sounds like a new beginning. Yes, it’s an end, but quite frankly we need to end this drunken party and sober up. Is this hopium? Not if we consciously let go of the past and work to create something different. In other words, forget about all the high tech solutions that turn out mostly to be a fancy way to try to sustain a system that needs to die. According to Nate, collapse is not inevitable. He says this about those who see collapse into chaos an inevitable:
“The world is not binary. And there’s a lot of stories out there which presume that after growth, we’re going to collapse. Those are two binary outcomes. I think a collapse is a mathematical possibility because there’s so much complexity and risk out there with nuclear war, runaway climate change, and all these other factors. But it’s a small possibility in my book—10 percent, or something like that. It’s much more likely that we are going to come down from this extremely high exosomatic energy orgy that we’ve had the last century.” https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/great-simplification/
So, what does that mean our New Years Resolutions should focus on? Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Less is More. No to economic and financial growth. Be ready for gut wrenching change. Stop working to support BAU. Walk the talk. Enjoy life with less energy and less stuff and less fear and more joy. Sound easy? Well it’s not. It’s really, really hard – but absolutely worth it.
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