Oh for chrissake! That idiot James Hansen is at it again!!!!

[GliderGuider]

5. Not cruel, utterly realistic.

The dreamers will think it's cruel, though.

I'm currently working up a new line of logic that wraps the whole shebang together - economic and population growth, pollution, climate change, the operation of markets and consumerism, greed, denial, hierarchies, developing vs developed nations etc. - without even invoking thermodynamics.

The premise is that one of the most powerful evolutionary motivators in any social species (and arguably the most important for humans) is status:

High status promotes higher fitness than low status, and evidence supports a strong relation between social rank and fitness or well-being (Barkow, 1975; Cowlishaw & Dunbar,1991; Hill, 1984).

Evolutionary account: emotions are fitness-maximizing affective mechanisms that coordinate cognitive, motivational, physiological, behavioral, and subjective responses to recurrent environmental events of evolutionary significance (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000; Nesse & Ellsworth, 2009)

Quotes taken from this presentation:
http://courses.washington.edu/evpsych/pride%20&%20status.pptx

Everything we do can be traced back in one way or another to efforts to improve our social status within our various in-groups. Because it is an evolved mechanism and as such is controlled by neural circuitry that is beyond our ability to control, it is virtually impossible for us to transcend its influence. Even the rejection of status within one in-group is a status enhancement in another (either within a new in-group or a selected sub-group of the original).

It takes a great deal of sophistication and honest self-reflection to even detect its operation within ourselves (but much less to detect it in others, of course ) Because all growth in population, economics (production, consumption and the markets that join the two) and social complexity is driven by status seeking, and that originates down in our wiring, even if we detect it, it's virtually impossible to prevent or derail.

While we can't change our wiring, we can control our individual behavior, with great effort. The problem comes in when groups are involved. Achieving status in a group requires one to adopt the group's norms. If one rejects something that the group uses to judge status (like conspicuous consumption or being very serious) one has to either stay and accept having low status (something that is very hard for people to accept), or leave and find another group.

The bottom line is, our evolved nature as intelligent, cooperative social beings in a high-resource environment has irretrievably screwed us.

My thinking on this is still in the early stages, but stay tuned over the next few weeks...