In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth

[GliderGuider]

40. Neoliberal Capitalism and the Second Law

I can't tell you how much I appreciate such a civil reply. It's enough to make me sell my trust fund!

In return, here's a bit of my own perspective and how I arrived at it.

Unfortunately the title and text of the OP article was about "neoliberal capitalism", because the author is fixated on it as being the destructive mechanism. He re-interpreted the Stockholm Resilience Center's findings through the lens of his own prejudice. That's understandable since we all do it, but like virtually all other commentators he studiously ignored the question of root cause. After all, neoliberal capitalism didn't just spring into the world full-grown and fully armed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. As an economic exploitation system it was an evolutionary development with a lineage that can be traced back through industrial capitalism, state capitalism, mercantilism, feudalism, monarchies and empires galore.

Environmental damage is detectable under all of those previous systems, and increased rapidly with the size of the economic units and their level of sophistication in organization, technology and energy deployment. Neoliberal capitalism just happens to be the most effective such exploitation mechanism yet devised on the planet, and for the moment has vanquished, neutralized or absorbed all significant competitors. Its effectiveness is patently obvious from the damage chronicled in Steffen's "Great Acceleration" graphs.

The failings of our current quasi-global system are not what fascinate me however, because they are trivially obvious. The question that has held my attention for the last decade is "When we can see such damage being done, why are we not acting to reduce it?" Why are we failing to act rationally in the face of such catastrophic existential risk?

I have looked for the answer through a process of root cause analysis, using the basic technique called "Five Whys":

The 5 Whys is a technique used in the Analyze phase of the Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) methodology. By repeatedly asking the question “Why” (five is a good rule of thumb), you can peel away the layers of symptoms which can lead to the root cause of a problem. Very often the ostensible reason for a problem will lead you to another question. Although this technique is called “5 Whys,” you may find that you will need to ask the question fewer or more times than five before you find the issue related to a problem.

I started from my question above and just kept asking "Why?" at each level until I could go no further. Roughly speaking, the levels involved:

• The history of social organization, including politics and economics;
  
• The forces that shape social structure and culture;
  
• Group and group membership psychology;
  
• Individual psychology regarding leadership and followership;
  
• The origins of short-term thinking and denialism;
  
• The history of technological development;
  
• The preference for physical comfort and future security;
  
• How human psychology has evolved;
  
• "Society as ecosystem" / "Society as organism";
  
• How natural selection applies to social organisms;
  
• What physical forces operate in natural selection and competition generally (e.g. the Maximum Power Principle);
  
• How living organisms obtain and use energy, and dispose of waste;
  
• The analogy between societies and organisms in their energy use and waste disposal;
  
• The fundamental role of energy in organisms and societies;
  
• How they extract usable low-entropy energy (exergy) from energy gradients and fuel sources;
  
• How they use the exergy for maintenance and growth;
  
• How they discard the higher-entropy waste in a way that doesn't harm the organism/society; and finally,
  
• How entropy production facilitates the general growth of system complexity.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it will serve as a thumbnail sketch of the territory I explored.

Once I had asked "Why?" about five thousand times, I found I had arrived at an irreducible question - a "Why" for which there was no known answer. The question was, "Why is the Second Law the energetic foundation of all change?" I am totally satisfied that it is. After performing my herculean feat of reductionism, I found that every thread of inquiry led straight back to the Second Law. Threads as different as why cells are structured as they are, why societies seem to have have growth imperatives, or why I will not usually turn down a raise, for example. Through a tangled chain of connections worthy of James Burke himself, they can all be traced back to the inexorable increase in entropy within whatever environment we are interested in.

There is one problem. The purpose of doing root cause analysis is to find the one thing you need to change to correct or prevent the problem. But if the root cause is thermodynamic to some degree in every case, and entropy cannot be prevented, what is to be changed? We can (with great effort) change the embroidery on the tapestry of life, but the warp and weft of its thermodynamic fabric is apparently unalterable.

Faced with that realization, I've largely stopped talking about it except in offhand comments. What can be gained from such a perspective? From the human point of view, absolutely nothing. It's a fundamentally nihilist perspective. The best I can do with it is to accept it and just move on with my life, to find happiness in the moment, as it pleases me. It has sure stopped me from worrying about how to prevent the looming collapse. This understanding is what has prompted me to walk away from activism and advocacy.

So when it comes to the nuclear/renewable/fossil energy turf war, perhaps it's clearer why I now call down a pox on all your houses.

My web site has a reading list of some of the papers that helped shape my inquiry:
http://paulchefurka.ca/Thermodynamics%20Reading%20List.html

It was nice chatting with you...