Bill, this is a remarkable essay. What strikes me most is that your critique is not simply that the Roadmap is inadequate, but that even a theoretically excellent roadmap collides with the deeper operating logic of modern techno-industrial society. The Roadmap asks the global system to move toward sufficiency, redistribution, public control of strategic assets, ecological limits, debt relief, and a "steady-state operating system." However, these objectives directly challenge the prevailing objective functions of modern institutions or scaled symbolic systems themselves: growth, accumulation, extraction, capital returns, geopolitical competition, and the continual expansion of material throughput.
This is where I think your analysis gets to the real mechanics of implementation failure. The obstacle is not merely insufficient knowledge, political will, or policy imagination. We have had decades of IPCC reports, climate agreements, ecological economics, degrowth scholarship, and increasingly sophisticated sustainability roadmaps. The question is no longer whether humanity understands the problem. The question is why implementation repeatedly fails despite that understanding.
From a game-theoretic perspective, the Roadmap presents a profound collective action problem. It requires virtually every dominant institution to voluntarily abandon the very objective functions that enabled its success. Elites are therefore not necessarily acting irrationally by resisting such proposals; they are responding rationally to the rules of the current game or symbolic adaptive environment. For corporations, governments, financial institutions, and even nation states, growth, competitive advantage, capital accumulation, resource acquisition, and geopolitical influence remain the dominant payoff functions. Unilaterally adopting steady-state principles would often mean sacrificing competitiveness, political influence, market position, financial returns, or strategic leverage while others continue optimizing under the existing game rules. Within the current institutional landscape, resistance therefore becomes the payoff-maximizing strategy.
At the same time, the broader population occupies a different, yet equally rational, strategic position. Modern techno-industrial society progressively organizes access to life's necessities through institutional participation. Employment provides income, but income is only one component of a much broader web of dependency. Debt obligations, mortgages, pensions, healthcare, education, insurance, banking systems, digital identity, communications platforms, energy infrastructure, food supply chains, transportation networks, and increasingly the technological ecosystems through which people work, transact, and socialize all become intertwined with participation in the existing institutional order. As these interdependent systems deepen and become more tightly coupled, exiting (or even significantly disrupting) the existing system carries immediate and tangible costs. Individuals therefore continue participating not because they necessarily endorse the long-term trajectory, but because remaining within the existing institutional framework or game minimizes near-term losses relative to highly uncertain alternatives. From an evolutionary game-theoretic perspective, both elites and ordinary participants are responding adaptively to their local incentive environments, even while those individually rational behaviours collectively reinforce an ecologically maladaptive global outcome.
This is why your conclusion resonates so deeply. It suggests that implementation failure is not principally a failure of knowledge, ethics, or leadership, but an emergent equilibrium generated by the architecture of the system itself. In my own work, I have described this as a loss-dominance equilibrium: once institutional dependencies become sufficiently deep, preserving the existing gameboard becomes the individually rational strategy for nearly every actor, despite broad recognition that the collective trajectory is ecologically and socially unsustainable.
One implication that I find particularly compelling is that these equilibria may not simply be maintained by institutions but progressively strengthened through evolutionary selection. Institutions whose objective functions reward perpetual growth, extraction, competitive advantage, and accumulation create persistent selection pressures favouring the behavioural strategies most effective within those environments. Over time, this generates a recursive feedback loop: institutional architectures increasingly reward behavioural traits optimized for the existing payoff structure, while alternative organizational logics become progressively less competitive. The persistence of the system therefore becomes not merely ideological or economic, but evolutionary.
That is why I found your closing observation so haunting. These Roadmaps reveal inviting roads not taken that cannot be taken, not because they are intellectually deficient or technically impossible, but because the existing institutional architecture has organized incentives, dependencies, and power in ways that make meaningful transformation strategically prohibitive. If that diagnosis is correct, then the challenge before us is not simply designing better economic models, but understanding how to alter the incentive structures and dependency structures that keep humanity locked into these rigid and stable equilibria. In the end, what we are facing might be a selection problem….A human maladaptation syndrome if you will :) “…And I go… in fear.”
Greg, this is a wonderful 'game theoretical' assessment and paraphrasing of my arguement. The key to our predicament is here, your words: "...implementation failure is not principally a failure of knowledge, ethics, or leadership, but an emergent equilibrium generated by the architecture of the system itself." Exactly so. The ideological and consequent operational and physical structures of MTI culture produce an equilibrium from which there is no practical escape for anyone, whether 'perpetrator' or victim.
The question posed by my human maladaptation syndrome, particularly combined with your psychopathic selection hypothesis, is whether there is any possible, fundamentally different, outcome. Is the human behavioural repertoire, (which evolved in paleolithic times) capable of generating a viable alternative in the context of large-scale societies and attendant institutions? Can any stable, humane way of being 'emerge' from the human genome interacting with the structural and functional properties of a largely synthetic or symbolic 'civilization'?
Thank you again for such a thoughtful response. I've found myself thinking about your question quite a bit over the past day because I suspect it gets to the heart of where The Human Maladaptation Syndrome HMS and PSH genuinely begin to intersect.
My answer is ultimately a cautious one. I do think a fundamentally different outcome is possible, but I highly doubt that it can emerge within the current MTI operating system. The question, as I see it, is no longer simply whether human beings possess sufficient empathy, intelligence, or cooperative capacity. Humans clearly possess a remarkably broad behavioural repertoire. The deeper question is whether the symbolic gameboard within which that repertoire is expressed permits those capacities to become evolutionarily stable at an enormous scale.
As I understand it, HMS identifies the evolutionary predicament. Human cognition evolved under Paleolithic tribal conditions characterized by repeated interaction, direct reciprocity, reputation, kinship, and immediate ecological feedback. MTI civilization represents an environment whose structural and functional properties differ profoundly from those conditions. Where PSH attempts to extend that argument is by asking a related question: once MTI civilization emerges as a synthetic symbolic environment, what kinds of behavioural architectures does symbolic selection begin favouring?
This is where I think our frameworks complement one another. HMS describes the mismatch. PSH attempts to describe the evolutionary dynamics operating within that mismatch.
One thought that continues to strike me is that MTI civilization is not merely a technological achievement or an economic system. It is also a symbolic operating system. Markets, money, banking, finance, corporations, bureaucracies, legal systems, media, digital platforms, technological infrastructures, and nation states collectively mediate access to food, housing, employment, healthcare, education, legitimacy, mobility, security, and political influence. Participation within those symbolic institutions increasingly determines survival itself.
As I argued in my previous comment, this creates an emergent equilibrium. What I have been wondering since reading your response is why such equilibria appear so extraordinarily resistant to voluntary change, and its something I'm supporting in an adjacent mathematical paper.
Game theory offers part of the answer. Once the costs of unilateral deviation from the game become immediate and concentrated while the benefits of cooperation remain delayed, uncertain, and dependent upon the behaviour of many other actors, individually rational strategies continually reproduce collectively maladaptive outcomes. Institutional economics adds another layer. As financial systems, labour markets, governments, legal systems, energy infrastructures, global supply chains, technological platforms, and bureaucratic institutions become significantly interdependent, they develop powerful forms of path dependence, institutional complementarity, increasing returns, and lock-in. Altering one component increasingly requires reorganizing many others simultaneously. Behavioural economics points in a similar direction through loss aversion and status quo effects, while complex systems theory suggests that tightly coupled systems with reinforcing feedbacks become extremely resistant to incremental reorganization. None of these perspectives alone explains our predicament, but taken together they suggest why large-scale symbolic equilibria become remarkably stable.
This is where I think PSH contributes something additional. Symbolic selection does not simply operate within that institutional architecture; it may progressively stabilize it. Behavioural architectures capable of maximizing symbolic reward under conditions of abstraction, delayed consequence, anonymity, and weak accountability acquire disproportionate symbolic success. The objective is not harm itself but symbolic reward. Harm matters primarily insofar as it alters expected symbolic payoff. If symbolic reward can be increased through deception, manipulation, coercion, regulatory capture, narrative control, rule modification, and the externalization of costs (and those strategies remain difficult to detect and are insufficiently punished) then they can become locally adaptive. Instrumental actors consequently acquire disproportionate influence over the objective functions, incentive structures, and rules governing future symbolic competition. Symbolic selection therefore becomes recursive. The behavioural architectures most successful under the existing game increasingly acquire the capacity to preserve and reproduce that very game.
This also helps clarify what I mean by the entrapment dynamics described in my book. Entrapment is not merely institutional dependency. It is the progressive compression of the available strategy space for game participants. Once access to life's necessities is routed through the existing symbolic architecture, adaptation itself becomes strategically constrained. Workers, corporations, political leaders, financial institutions, and nation states may all recognize the long-term trajectory, yet each incurs immediate and concentrated losses by deviating from game participation while the benefits of cooperation remain uncertain and contingent upon the behaviour of others. The equilibrium therefore persists not because it is humane, efficient, or ecologically viable, but because continuation becomes strategically less costly than departure for nearly every major class of actor (as stated previously).
This is why I continue to think Loss-Dominant Equilibrium is an important part of the story. It is my attempt to describe a macro-scale condition in which game-theoretic coordination problems, institutional lock-in, dependency formation, and symbolic selection converge into a single self-reinforcing equilibrium. Adaptation becomes substantially more difficult because the operating system itself continuously reproduces the conditions required for its own persistence.
If that interpretation is broadly correct, then perhaps collapse is not simply the consequence of ecological overshoot, nor merely of human maladaptation. It may emerge from the interaction between the two. HMS begins from the observation that the behavioural repertoire of Homo sapiens evolved under Paleolithic tribal conditions but is now expressed within the radically different structural and functional conditions of MTI civilization. PSH suggests that symbolic selection operating within that environment progressively favours behavioural architectures optimized for success under its prevailing objective functions. Those successful behavioural architectures reshape institutions, deepen dependency, compress the available strategy space of game participants through PSH dynamics, and stabilize Loss-Dominant Equilibria. Collapse, therefore, is not intentional, but the long-run consequence of globally maladaptive equilibria becoming evolutionarily stable.
That brings me back to your original question. I suspect that the central issue is not whether humans are capable of cooperation. We plainly are. The more difficult question is whether MTI symbolic civilizations possess sufficient adaptive capacity to reorganize their own operating systems before material reality reorganizes them instead. Historically, major institutional transformations often appear to follow periods in which ecological, energetic, epidemiological, military, or economic realities overwhelm the existing symbolic order. The unresolved question is whether a planetary civilization can voluntarily reconfigure the symbolic selection environment before those external constraints impose their own reorganization.
If that is the right question, then perhaps HMS and PSH are describing different levels of the same process. HMS explains the evolutionary predicament. PSH attempts to explain the evolutionary dynamics that unfold within it. Together, they leave us with what may be the defining question of our time: can we consciously construct symbolic institutions in which cooperative, reciprocal, and ecologically regenerative behavioural architectures become more adaptive than extractive ones? I wonder whether that is the real challenge before us.
“When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”
“Stabilizing selection is a type of natural selection in which the population mean stabilizes on a particular non-extreme trait value.” [...]
“Stabilizing selection causes the narrowing of the phenotypes seen in a population. This is because the extreme phenotypes are selected against, causing reduced survival in organisms with those traits.” Wikipedia
What does this tell me as for your PSHypothesis? That “psychopathy” is probably the non-extreme trait / phenotype that guided the species in this predicament... Wow...
The researchers say:
“Furthermore, we cannot rule out the possibility that linear directional selection played a role under more complex evolutionary scenarios, such as punctuated equilibrium models”
(Evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo, Nature Communications/Mark Hubbe and Katerina Harvati)
And the researchers of the above mentioned publication conclude with the following:
“In conclusion, our results are consistent with previous work suggesting a limited role for gradual directional selection in human evolution and underscore the importance of stabilizing selection and constraints, which our analyses strongly supported relative to other evolutionary processes.”
(Evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo, Nature Communications/Mark Hubbe and Katerina Harvati)
Oh-my-God. Not good news for “anatomically-modern-humans”.
Psychopaths by necessity or by choice? This question remains...
What to say anymore? Is there anything one can “propose”?
Thank you kindly for sharing, George. This is extremely fascinating based on a quick perusing of the first article you shared. I will continue perusing most definitely :)
Also, if you’re interested you can check out a mathematical paper I’m working on that supports PSH (it is accessible to non-mathematicians as well I believe). Link to article here: https://zenodo.org/records/21225929
your ideas sound compelling. I stand at this: “The persistence of the system therefore becomes not merely ideological or economic, but evolutionary.”
Let’s examine from your perspective/hypothesis, the individually rational strategy that applies to “nearly every actor” and the persistence of the system not by virtue of ideology or economics but of evolution, a real-life example which puzzles me: the Covid pandemic crisis management.
The Covid pandemic was not simply about a health issue. It was about policies, measures applied uniformly and almost universally. I wonder, what might be the cause that made people disagree and divide upon this matter? In any case, the Covid pandemic is a discrete, unique and universal circumstance of the contemporary world, where everybody was faced with both a personal/individual and societal responsibility and was called upon, imperatively, to make a decision: Either/Or.
Since the evaluation of the effects of the Covid crisis is still ongoing and the conclusions remain controversial, I think it would be fruitful to examine such a case through the lens of evolution (societal-anthropological/ontological) that you hypothesize here.
Even after all that, I don't see this document as an MTI Society wrecking ball - no wrecking ball is needed! The status quo will collapse on its own, as you so often point out. Agreed - this roadmap will never be used to bring down the flawed systems.
AND YET...
I still think it useful to do as much homework as we can on how we might avoid the same flawed societal structures in the future, based on the chance (probably a good one) that some H. sapiens will survive the collapse. Pockets may well emerge from the resulting global anarchy and chaos that need a new set of operating procedures.
Our invented More is ALWAYS Better value system (measuring success by a number) is a bit like our spent nuclear waste. The best we can do is to flag that toxicity as something to be avoided for as long as the message can be communicated.
Thank you for this. I think the article is both sobering and largely right in its critique of growth economics, overshoot, and the profound inadequacy of most “roadmaps” that leave the deeper operating system untouched.
Where I wonder if there is still an assumption worth challenging is around the nature of humanity itself.
The piece seems to assume, perhaps understandably, that human beings will continue to function primarily as extractive and consumptive agents within the ecosphere. On that basis, collapse or contraction becomes almost inevitable. But I am not convinced that extractive humanity is the only humanity available to us.
From the perspective of Human Systems Ecology, the problem is not humanity as such. The problem is disembedded humanity — human beings cut off from place, season, limits, community, ancestry, ritual, obligation and the living systems that actually regulate us. When humans are placed inside extractive systems, trained by extractive stories, and rewarded for extractive behaviour, they become extractive. But that is not the same as saying extraction is our fixed nature.
There is another possibility: that human culture, at sufficient scale, could become a regenerative layer of the biosphere rather than a parasitic one. Not through another industrial-scale management program, and not through green versions of the same old growth logic, but through a fundamental shift in identity and relationship. Humans could come to understand themselves not as consumers of an external “environment”, but as ecological participants nested within living systems.
That may sound idealistic, but in one sense it is the simplest shift imaginable: a change of mind. Not a change of opinion, but a change in the ground from which perception arises. If the self is understood as separate, the world becomes resource. If the self is understood as ecological, the world becomes kin, context and responsibility.
This is where I think Human Systems Ecology may add something to the overshoot conversation. It does not deny the biophysical limits. It takes them seriously. But it also asks what kind of human being is capable of living within limits without experiencing them only as deprivation. My sense is that limits become liveable when they are held inside relationship — to land, food, water, children, ancestors, community and future generations.
So perhaps the question is not simply whether the current roadmap can be taken by the civilisation that growth built. It probably cannot. The deeper question is whether enough people, places and communities can undergo the ecological conversion of identity required to become regenerative before contraction makes that conversion non-negotiable.
The problem is not that humans are ecological. The problem is that we have forgotten how to be ecological well.
You might be interested to learn that before the rise of civilizations there is evidence of humans living in large settlements that were self governed and non-hierarchical. They were indeed place based, altho they also travelled hundreds of kms for trade and to diversify the gene pool. These settlements had small footprints. We may have started as isolated hunter gatherers, but our social nature led us to cooperate in much larger groups - but without dominance hierarchies. Google Luke Kemp for links.
"there is evidence of humans living in large settlements that were self governed and non-hierarchical."
In my informal survey, I've come to the conclusion that the invention of grain agriculture is the culprit. For the first time in human history, grain allowed the accumulation of wealth. Grain agriculture independently arose some six or seven thousand years ago, in places like Mesopotamia (wheat), India and China (rice), and Mesoamerica (corn).
However, about the same time in coastal British Columbia, a civilization arose that was non-hierarchical. It is difficult to research, because it left no pyramids, temples, and other enduring monuments. It was centred near present-day Hazelton, where dozens of non-native varieties of hazelnuts from as far as Alberta and Oregon can be found.
Unlike grain, hazelnuts go rancid and cannot be stored without modern refrigeration.
yes, the grain surplus made a huge difference in terms of what was possible. Once there was reliable surplus it had to be managed. Elite dominance evolved and became acceptable to ensure the surplus continued (at least that was what the elite narrative said). Other means of organizing the surplus (its production and distribution) could have evolved, but didnt. Dominant personalities took over, supported by the presence of better weapons, to enforce their rule. And we've been stuck with this model ever since. But most of human existence was spent with a very different kind of organization. We are capable of better. Luke Kemp has summarized much of this and is worth a read or view.
A wonderfully honest, dismal synopsis of the human predicament, by illustrating the Roadmap that would be needed to even mitigate collapse, and why that Roadmap can and will never be taken. Thanks Bill!
I am going to comment with the same hammerhead obduracy that I have always done here : why is there only the most fleeting of off-hand references to the major ultrasocial force driving overshoot towards extinction in this otherwise excellent and wise essay?
2 whole uses of the word "corporations" in this Olympian essay?
The United Nations has zero record of halting the invasive overgrowth of corporations and state corporations in our lifetime. Ultra-extreme economic inequality, massive immiseration of the majority of living humans, biodiversity flattening, a thousand other biosocial failures - those are all direct products, that is, basic externalizations, of the living, breathing entity that is the global corporate supersystem.
Does anyone in this laudable report, or anyone typing away in Substackland, have the slightest testable or viable idea of how to cut into this controlling entity? Of course not, not ever. The central perpetrator is never mentioned, and I'm not sure why.
Quote from the article. Our predicaments stem from long before corporations existed.
"H. sapiens for 350,000 years, but so-called ‘civilization’ for only ~6000 years. "
and we are living in a world we are not evolved to deal with:
"This means that the human brain and behavioural repertoire evolved in, and are adapted to, life in small foraging groups or hunter-gatherer bands living in relatively unchanging, spatially limited home ranges. This suggests, in turn, that the human psyche and innated associated behaviours may well be maladapted to many of the physical and social dimensions of life in large-scale societies."
Corporations are a symptom of our dilemma, not a cause.
Mark is correct. Corporations are a symptom, not a cause. So what IS that symptom? What cause is it pointing too? Why are corporations different than any other group of humans? I believe this to be a critical question to answer.
The value system of (assuming business) corporations is distinct from general human values in a very clear way. Success for a corporation is not tied to any qualitative natural/human values. The closest they ever came to this was long ago, when a very small few of them were created to achieve a very specific project and then dissolved once the goal had been reached. (In other words, the concept of "enough" was baked in.)
Beyond that, WE invented business corporations with a singular goal in mind: to maximize virtual wealth. We could stop right there with those three words. Virtual wealth is a number. Numbers are limitless. Therefore, there IS NO maximum. More is Always Better. In those three words, it should be obvious that we invented theoretically *immortal* structures, (eventually giving them the same rights as humans), and demanded that they embark on an impossible crusade that could only ever result in non-stop consumption on a finite planet.
So, yes, corporations are only a symptom, but they point directly at the flawed value system underpinning it all. Measuring success by number.
Martin lists "ultra-extreme economic inequality, massive immiseration of the majority of living humans, biodiversity flattening, a thousand other biosocial failures". Such things did in fact exist before corporations did, but they are all based on the idea that More is Always Better - something that, by the way, also results in overpopulation!
"More is Always Better" may seem like a tautology. Of course - more is Always better. And yet this concept exists nowhere else in the natural world. To *everything* there is a concept of "enough", "sufficiency" - for food, water, warmth, progeny, even happiness chemicals. I do not question the Maximum Power Principle of individuals maximizing the consumption of available resources, but all of that is subject to both external *and* internal feedback loops of sufficiency and negative feedback.
Hi Sandy, the way to approach it perhaps is to imagine what would happen if we arrested or assassinated all the current elites, Musk, Bezos, etc, oil company CEOs etc then basically stole their assets for the public redistribution, but we didn't change anything else. What would happen?
The next tier down, some being their surplus offspring would then buy up all those assets and repeat the cycle.
Evolutionary drivers coupled with physics are a bit brutal. I would argue that, to thrive sustainably and alongside all the other 10 million species also thriving, we would have to alter evolution itself. IE get rid of the MPP in some way, species wide for us, simultaneously. That is, to me, the magnitude of the predicament we are in.
Is that possible? Can we even imagine it? I don't think so.
Hi Mark. I agree that the MPP (Maximum Power Principle) is a real kicker. And yet, the MPP applies to *every* species, and always has. So I don't think that MPP alone is the problem.
Andrew, great to discover your substack, which I will explore in more depth later. For now, just to say that I have also been trying to reconcile the MPP with our current predicament and how it clashes with successful adaptation. Some ways of looking at it are in terms of short vs long term adaptation, or in terms of what is biologically determined and what is culturally determined. If one takes a long term view then choosing to act on the MPP clearly does not make any sense given the abnormal growth in population and consumption our species has brought us to. We can choose how and when we apply the MPP. It is not a biological determinant of our behaviour, but an option we can choose to use when needed. If adaptation is necessary for survival, we are fortunate to have evolved culture as a means of influencing human behaviour. We've certainly messed it up recently, but we can still choose to limit consumption and strive for a steady state economy a la Daly.
At least you two are thinking about this issue, but I still find so much to object to - you don’t seem to get the fundamental issue at all.
Symptom/cause - come on, it’s much deeper than that. What were once symptoms, are now causes, and even the cause. You two are like gun nuts, objecting to any focus on the mass availability of guns in the US as the primary drivers of insane levels of gun violence in the US. Was there lethal violence in our human past. Yes, but the exponential proliferation of guns makes gun homicide in the US orders of magnitude more horrific than just having knives and fists around.
Same with transnational corporations and state corporations. Our propensity for organized cooperative ultrasocial killing predated the arrival of them, but this evolved mechanism for absorbing the least regulated, most insidious forms of killing and control now runs all social institutions, from the pathetic courts, the subservient higher education mills, the religions, politics of course, everything.
Ants and termites, our fellow ultrasocial species, don’t waste time debating what’s a symptom, what’s a cause, they self-organize in highly destructive social hierarchies. Values don’t matter to ants, or termites, or us - fear of others does, fear of ostracism, fear of losing place or advantage, which is why US corporations have virtually no federal oversight, and only the lightest of state oversight from the laughable corrupt and captured state of Delaware, where they, the corporations, can choose to reside, though that’s now changing with the moron state of Texas now bidding to be their new host.
I don’t encourage talking past each other here in this limited forum. People getting nice paychecks from corporations love it when we either refuse to talk about them or adopt convenient excuses for their obvious insulated forms of ultra-criminality.
Where to begin, Martin? Your observation is not wrong. Yes, we have long developed a preference to measure value by number, but now that we have mega-corporations, things have gone to hell in a handcart. That is the math of exponential functions - such evolution is inevitable. And yes, if we could eliminate these monstrosities, the world would undoubtedly be a better place - sort of. This might be a bit simplistic though, don't you think?
You clearly don't like corporations (especially big ones), and yet I'll bet that you, like pretty much everyone, are motivated to increasing you own personal wealth whenever you can. (That would be a value that you share with corporations, but, because they have no other values to worry about, they are generally better at it than you.) I might even be willing to bet that you have investments, either directly or indirectly, that are striving to grow corporate value in order to produce a return for your portfolio or pension plan or whatever.
Your observation: "Values don’t matter to ants, or termites, or us - fear of others does, fear of ostracism, fear of losing place or advantage..." indicates to me that you have failed to grasp the usage of the term "values" in this conversation. Fair enough - such terms can have fuzzy definitions. (Any organism making a choice - even a tree deciding to grow up instead of down - has 'values' that matter.)
Your reference to "people getting nice paychecks from corporations" suggests to me that you are not one of those people. Lucky you. And yet, again like most people, if you *do* have a paying job, you recognize its criticality to your survival, and I think you would make a fuss if anyone suggested eliminating it. That is what a society based on numeric success and values is all about. (Not that you care about values, right?)
The "obvious insulated forms of ultra-criminality" that you speak of is unclear. Most corporate leaching from society is done under the existing laws, which greatly favour them. (Or were you thinking 'criminal' in the moral/values sense?) Regardless, the worst offences (legally as well as morally) no doubt happen at the very top.
Which brings us to the real crisis in the industrialized world today. Because it is NOT a conflict between left and right ideologies. That is simply a systemic ruse to disguise the fact that the real problem is the divide between the uber-rich and the 99.9%. And in a society where numbers hold all the power (not that values matter, right?), the governments will be run by the rich. Full stop. It's pretty much impossible to become uber-rich without several corporations making that happen. If you want to know why corporations seem to be insufficiently regulated and given free rein, you need look no further.
Finally, I have to presume from some inferences that you are presently a resident of the United States. As a Canadian, I have to cut you some slack. Suffering under the level of incomprehensible (and by that, I mostly mean incomprehensibly visible and blatant) corruption that you live under now, I fully sympathize with your frustration at "all social institutions, from the pathetic courts, the subservient higher education mills, the religions, politics of course, everything." The United States embodies the rule of number-based value systems perhaps better than any empire that we know of in written history. Wealth, votes, likes, views, profit margins, market share, ratings, acres, ownership, missile counts, military might, and yes, corporations are sacred to everything your country does. You are right to be upset.
I can't comment on why you don't see enough people trashing corporations on Substack. Perhaps you are simply not following the crowd that you seek. I'm sure they're out there. Still, another explanation might be the fact that many other writers recognize the problem as being slightly more complicated than what you envision.
You gave it the good Canadian go there, but there is also some buffering/spinning of the dial going on. Still, it's good to every once in a while air out some blasts of commentariate, just to see if there are any valuable pieces in the rubble. How is your your amateur psychology analysis from across the ether? Not bad, not great.
Corporations could not have been eliminated even in the most fanciful historical proposition, but they could have been regulated, held liable for their externalizations, subsumed under greater forces of social control - but they were not, not by any stretch of the term.
No, I am not personally motivated by "increasing you own personal wealth whenever you can," since I have a conscience, think about the lives of others in this world, etc. - but I accept the dictates of my social reality. Investments are just names on a spreadsheet, meaning disinvestment or adherence to corporate social responsibility is just fantasy.
There is no "law" on the books to effectively govern corporate predation, so yes, we as humans should always strive to define criminality according to actual actions. Surely by no we can accept that the law is fundamentally unjust.
Actually, rightist ideologies are definitely the problem, the winner, the cause, the death of humanity. Leftism, in whatever form of humanism you might define, was killed off by this invasive species. The 99.9 trope (where's that extra .9 come from?) is just an evasion of sociological reality - the numbers, like whatever you want to define as "values," are inherently obfuscating and ridiculous. The 1%, or the .1%, or the .001%, or whatever baseless number you want to invoke, are simply products of an anti-human supersystem, but they are human extensions of ourselves, as you do seem to point to. The lower level corporate drones are just as culpable for being dragged by this insanely out-of-control system as the miserable psychopaths at the heights that you define them.
Yeah, your crystal ball correctly identified my geographic location - but let's not let Canada play the poor liberal victim. Canadian mining companies are not staffed with moral exemplars. Mulrooney and Trudeau were not progressive icons.
Lastly, I'm not looking for Occupado-style "trashing" of corporations - pointless, given their totalitarian power. I just object, every now and then, and really for no good reason, to endless boring bullshit that never names the central perpetrator, of which Substack is certainly one.
Recent archaeological evidence indicates that humans lived in large settlements before the rise of civilizations. These settlements were self governing and largely egalitarian. People seemed to live lives of sufficiency rather than surplus. Civilizations emerged when surpluses could be consistently provided. Elite capture of how the surpluses were managed might be considered the critical turning point for humanity in terms of our current predicament. Fossil fuels and corporations accelerated a process already well entrenched in human activity. See Luke Kemp for details.
“Recent archeological evidence” as reflected in Occupado movement guru Graeber’s “Dawn of the Deal”? I’m not buying that cherry-picked pseudo-history view of my inherited species. Humans are ultrasocial intelligent killers - megafauna, other mammals, their own kind, and now their own necessary biological bases for self-survival. If there were a few instances of happy singalong relatively egalitarian settlements in our human history, those are nothing compared to the ultra-extreme economic and social inequality and techno war destruction that is our corporate-controlled destiny now.
Have a look at Luke Kemp's Goliath: the history and future of societal collapse. Humans are indeed capable of organized violence. Interestingly, there is no archaeological evidence of organized violence before civilizations emerged. Yes, there is evidence of violent exchanges, but at the level of interpersonal conflicts - and not even much of that. To accept evidence that humans lived in large egalitarian settlements with no organized violence for millennia is not to deny the destructiveness of the current corporate controlled system we now have. Nor is it necessary to assume these settlements were utopian and without real challenges. The point is they endured for millennia. Our natural state as social creatures is the former. Our challenge is how to reclaim that natural state and escape the destructiveness of our current much more recent predicament.
Oh, I've been exposed to Luke and his T-Shirt on podcasts, and it's more Olympian Hariri-style potted history that ends up with the glaze of instructive hopium ("don't be a dick') that is completely useless.
I'm not suggesting everything Kemp says makes sense. The issue is what life was like before civilization emerged. What is your evidence that organized violence was common during that period?
Excellent books on the horrific violence from earlier human societies exist downstairs all throughout my library - but I've got to go outside to have a drink with my wife.
I'm glad you looked at all these deeply researched books. Remember, though the word "cooperate" also refers to the ultrasocial ability of homo sapiens, "indigenous" in the term, to hunt together to drive megafauna to extinction. Where humans appear, extinction rates soar.
And as much as your comment reflects an honest attempt to grapple with this enormous and consequential subject, I see no evidence whatsoever that we humans of today have the slightest capacity to collectively "decide" anything about our fate. "We," in the sense of collective social power, refers only to the corporate capitalized class.
Agree that the "we" doesn't refer to the species level, but perhaps evolutionary adaptation never did. Those that adapted survived and those that didn't were gone. The elite narrative (how I'd term your notion of corporate control) is very successful at conning people into believing the system the elite have established is the best ( + TINA). But there are many examples of small scale "we" groups who seem to have some sense of the con and are working along cooperative lines to prepare an exit of the elite system. Maybe they will prove to be adaptive, maybe not. But I suggest they are worth acknowledging and promoting. Cheers
"As Roadmap illustrates, it is entirely possible to conceive of an equitable steady-state economy if ..."
No "if" is needed. It isn't possible, for me at least, to conceive of such an economy. You rightly nip that hope in the bud but one of the other reasons it is inconceivable is that "caps on resource use" does nothing to make non-renewable resource use sustainable. A steady state economy is impossible, even for a short time, since as resources become scarcer and harder to access, the economy needs to grow in order to increase the complexity needed to access and refine more difficult to reach and lower quality ores. This is in addition to all of the reasons you illustrate for such a roadmap to be delusion.
On one level, any economy is doomed since Earth will be cindered in a few billion years and many other unsurvivable events may occur long befor then. However, it is interesting (if not practical) to think about alternatives on a humanity-meaningful time scale. Your objection to 'steady-state' assumes dependence on non-renewables. Non-human species have always had more or less steady-state economies (material relationships within their ecosystems). Even Hominins lived for hundreds of thousands of years using mostly renewable resources, the products of photosysnthesis (food and natural fibre), and a bit of stone. Combine this with very measured uses of certain metalic non-renewables and a population of a few tens of millions, and H. sapiens could exist in what would be a virtual steady-state for a very long time--certainly thousands of years. Admittedly, this is not going to happen voluntarily, but may be the best our species can manage should there be survivors after the crash (of course, there may not be, if the crash is due to nuclear stupidity).
Oh yes, provided the capability to work existing, extracted, metal resources is retained, a far smaller population could continue with something slightly up on hunting and gathering for perhaps thousands of years. But they wouldn't be able to extract any more raw materials, and I'm not sure they'd be able to recover and rework metals (including rusted metals) for that long.
My take is that the only way of life that is potentially sustainable is hunting and gathering. I say "potentially" because it isn't guaranteed, especially with tool use, to only hunt and gather food resources at or below their renewal rates.
I doubt many people would think of a hunter-gatherer society as having an economy, so the phrase "steady state economy" is perhaps inappropriate, in this case. Steady state advocates, though, believe (it is a faith) that a modern society can thrive in a steady state for ever (up to the end of life on Earth).
Basically, I agree, except by functional definitions, hunter-gathering with exchange or trade would certainly qualify as an 'economy'. Also, I and many of my colleagues/friends are steady-state advocates but none believe that 'modern' (high intensity) society can be steady-state. I don't even subscribe to the notion of a circular economy (that's a longish story).
I'm having a hard time imagining what hunter-gatherer tribes would be exchanging or trading. Certainly, that happens with contacted hunter-gatherer tribes embedded in modernity but if there are only hunter-gatherer tribes, not so much, if at all.
Even then, steady-state would only be possible during fairly stable environmentally and ecologically stable times, which will always be temporary (but, again, a few thousand years would do me).
my (limited) knowledge of the archaeological data is that during the paleolithic period, human groups routinely travelled hundreds of km annually to trade and expand their gene pool. Our species succeeded in part because of this expanded gene pool. The trade may have been for certain kinds of stones used for tools or art, for example. The evidence for this is pretty clear.
Yeah, some basic trading, I'm sure went on but I'm not sure when that started though the kinds of things you mentioned (plus probably trading techniques) I personally wouldn't think of as an economy. Still, we know how that all worked out up to the present time. Steady state may be technically possible in that era (at least for thousands of years, even if basic metal tools were traded) but, given what actually happened, it is bound to eventually fall apart, just like it is now.
Mike, you are correct that the idea of a steady state economy has been corrupted to assume it could mean simply not growing anymore. Folks who believe that simply haven't done their research. A genuine steady state economy could only occur with material throughput at a rate below the regenerative capacity of the resources consumed. Herman Daly's work describes this well.
PS. What we know about hunter-gatherer societies is that they have lots of leisure and high levels of life satisfaction. It may look dismal from our privileged positions, but that's our problem.
Swidden agriculture (where it's possible) and hunter-gathering (also where possible) will support ~100-200 million for many thousands of years. I don't think we should sell such a society short--we needn't be hi-tech to be 'advanced.'
Regarding your comment "A steady state economy is impossible, even for a short time, since as resources become scarcer and harder to access, the economy needs to grow in order to increase the complexity needed to access and refine more difficult to reach and lower quality ores." A steady state economy is inevitable, altho it's highly unlikely it will be planned. Yes, the economy would need to grow to access more lower quality resources, but that is exactly why the economy will stop growing at some point; there won't be sufficient non-renewable resources to bother extracting. Humans lived for millennia on renewable resources and that will happen again if some humans make it thru what's coming. Planning for a steady state economy is the sensible thing to do, but we're not being sensible, and we likely dont have time, given how rapidly irreversible ecological tipping points are approaching.
I agree that a steady state economy is inevitable though I'm not sure many people would refer to it as an economy. Planning for a modern steady state economy is doomed to failure, for the reason I mentioned. If it is ever planned and executed, the failure to reach a steady state could mean an attempted return to unsustainable growth.
An economy is basically people working together to meet their collective needs. This makes sense because we have both physical and social needs that are most efficiently met by cooperating. This can be done sustainably because these universal basic needs are satiable. I'm not sure what you might mean by "a modern steady state economy" as together those terms are an oxymoron. No, a "modern" industrial technology economy can never be a steady state economy because it would require both high levels of cheap energy and unsustainable material throughput. A steady state economy has to rely on the sustainable use of renewable resources, and a much smaller population that operates within earth's carrying capacity. Material throughput has to be below the earth's regenerative capacity to be sustainable.
“If history and the momentum of MTI culture are any guide, Roadmap has less chance of taking flight than does a butterfly glued to a lead brick.”
Professor Rees, you certainly inspired me and this comes like a weird synchronicity because I was thinking almost the same thing as your “glued butterfly” metaphor. This is so strange! So, here is what I was thinking.
The whole MTI venture reminds me of a commercial airplane, full of happy and unaware tourists/consumers, ready to take off. Taxiing casually on the runway, the pilots prepare for take-off procedures. All seem in place. Initiation of take-off sequence. Plane accelerates on runway.
Suddenly a “bang” is heard, but it is too isolated, too short, too vague to disrupt the happy atmosphere and the “good vibrations”. Hey, we’re on holidays!
That explosion was the sound of engines failing (bio-psycho-physical limits). No other sound disrupts the happy atmosphere after this brief disturbance. It was too vague for our tourists to take notice and start worrying (insert BAU here). A critical disturbance that now poses a severe threat.
Engines failed. And they failed at the exact point where the co-pilot uttered the critical words: “V-1”. V-1, point of no return. Hands-off throttles! Plane still on runway, plane must take off. There is not enough runway to stop. Co-pilot: “Rotate” (insert “roadmap” here)...
Actually, there was a flight resembling this imaginary scenario, but it was the outlier, an extreme outlier. Flight 411 of Olympic Airways, from Athens to NY, back in 1978. The Captain was the experienced Greek pilot Sifis Migadis, a pilot whose ingenuity, intuition, sound judgement, focus and quick decision making, all combined, have accomplished the impossible. He saved a doomed Boeing 747, and averted a tragedy that could be the worst in Hellenic aviation. This mystery still puzzles aviation industry and cycles. They ran simulations. “Roadmaps”. All simulations resulted in crash. The plane was considered lost, virtually impossible to fly. Sifis Migadis broke all rules and protocols in order to accomplish this.
What the MTI aberration suffers from is taking “human ingenuity” for granted. This is a serious disease. Not only MTI aberration is taking, say, a Sifis for granted, saving a lost airplane, but doing so by drafting and following roadmaps. This is the ultimate paradox. In this respect, MTI agents (mis)identify themselves as Sifis, a mis-reading of the situation, if nothing more dark. Human ingenuity exists, there is no doubt about it. But it is rare. Circumstance makes it stand out, not “roadmaps”. One cannot force ingenuity into existence, neither assume it. Ingenuity happens as a miracle, where even “roadmaps” bend.
Some remarks on your second footnote on “growth”.
Interestingly enough, Marx deemed Ancient Hellenes as the “juvenile” phase of humanity (Grundrisse). Now we are “grown up”, at last! But what comes up must come down. The “childhood” phase of humanity implies senescence and a death too. And since Marx’s frame of reference is history... one can imagine the rest.
Secondly, one cannot borrow a juvenile humanity’s socio-political regime (aka democracy) happening within its presumed still underdeveloped/non evolved society, and then pretend that... it has grown up. There is no authentic democracy counted in millions or billions. Actually, the West deems democracy (the kratos of demos) as its apex. The “juvenile phase of humanity” thought of it only as an experiment, limited in time and numbers, and under this term it agreed entering the experiment. No guarantees. In fact, today there is a grotesque semblance of Athenian democracy, full of “depositories”... Now, how come that Greeks knew that: “ὦ Σόλων, Σόλων, Ἕλληνες ἀεὶ παῖδές ἐστε, γέρων δὲ Ἕλλην οὐκ ἔστιν.” (Oh Solon, you Hellenes always remain children, there is no old Hellene - Timaeus/Plato). Those folks had some serious self-awareness, it appears, and anthropological self-check mechanisms.
Moreover, Marx assumed that mythology disappears with the real domination over natural forces, which of course could not be farther from truth. Not because mythology is “childish”, but because nature has never been conquered. We now witness the aftermath of man’s presumed “supremacy” over nature...
Thank you Dr. Rees for writing this in such a straightforward manner. I usually read your pieces twice, there's so much to digest and understand, and I just want to tell you you are so appreciated. Your comment section is excellent as always. - Sandy-
The United Nations is simply a collection of politicians and bureaucrats seeking to expand political power beyond national borders under the guise of moral causes.
Like all bureaucracies, it has a vested interest in perpetuating itself, increasing its influence, and advancing the careers of those within it.
Funded by other people's money, politicians and bureaucrats have every incentive to expand their power, influence, and budgets rather than solve the problems they claim to address.
The analysis of institutional lock-in and game theory is rigorous and correct. Yet the root variable remains unaddressed.
The obstacle isn't just the system; it's the operator. People no longer know how to be human. People don't know how to be people.
We have forgotten the baseline behaviors required to exist within ecological limits. Until we reclaim that fundamental capacity—learning to be people again—no roadmap, policy, or structural fix will hold. If we solve the human equation, the rest becomes solvable. Without it, we are just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
While I agree with the analysis, and the futility of trying to make the changes that would be necessary for MTI to avoid its inevitable collision course with self-destruction, I would like to point out that there are thousands of communities around the world that are actively involved in creating alternative societies which explicitly consider themselves to be a part of nature. As such they are explicitly creating spaces in which they will (hopefully) be prepared to survive the coming Armageddon. Many of these communities are organized within the international consortium "Territories of Life" (valuable information about this grouping is readily available on the Web.!
Absolutely so, David. In other writing and comments, I refer to such communities and smaller groups as 'lifeboats' and hold out hope that they don't get sucked down in the vortex created by the MTI Titanic as she goes down.
Didn't read the whole thing, lost me at "we economists have done maths". Allright then, a spreadsheet of social ideals. With one column for how the basic economy is going to pay for it, "we just ask for more technology and stuffs, and shuffle things around until the spreadsheet balances".
You have many of the parameters of the predicament correct.
ecological overshoot. (more consumption than production)
human’s activities displace all other activities
crustal resource depletion (deliveries of energy and mass decline)
limbic brain created civilization and can not manage the processes leading to outcomes.
here is one you could add to your list
Human existence has momentum — any changes causes injury.
But that does not mean homo sapiens will have to get crushed into a dark age or worse.
There are behaviors (they cause injuries) that can ferry humankind maintaining progress through Catton’s bottleneck. These behaviors can be implemented by a single rational actor. Because the act does not require institutional participation the act has a high probably of being implemented.
If that behavior is taken
The present global population will exit
the infrastructure will empty
their mass energy flows will stop.
the toxic residue could be cleaned up or sequestered.
A smaller new civilization (with a maintainable population, mass energy flows, with operational rules that
manage its momentum could be built and launched like lifeboats from the titanic by 2100
Finally, there could be between now and 2300, the develop in each member of the graduating constituency changes in cognitive abilities that dominate the function of our evolved limbic development. For example, The constituency has no discount rate. They learn from inference rather than experience. inference learning determines behavior.
I have been working on these components for 50 years. At amazon there are five books (Time blind book Series Jack Alpert) that chronicle my wrong turns and current trajectory.
Time Blind book 2 “Civilization’s Path Forward.” 2026 describes the activities and structure that produce a viable — that is a non injury producing civilization.
The single behavior that makes the activities in book 2 possible is the existing 8.4 billion people are successfully and irreversibly sterilized. (There is a mechanism to create the replacement population for the life boats who will not have any cultural content of the exiting population. )
I welcome everyone’s help there is much left to be designed, built, and implemented.
Well, said. Here's a parable that says it - with more clarity.
A Gaian parable about pouring our life force into an empty well. Inputs don’t necessarily produce outputs; sunk-cost thinking can betray us; and if we grasp for excess, we might fail to notice sufficiency.
The empty well
Once a man, while wandering in an arid and wind-swept valley, came upon an old well, its stones weathered and cool. He was thirsty, and the well promised an abundance of water.
So he lowered a bucket hanging over the opening into the well, anticipating a bucketful of fresh water. He would drink from the bucket; he would splash water on his face; he would drink some more.
But when he pulled the bucket up from the well, it was empty. What to do? He had once heard that if you prime a well with some water, its deep springs come to life. “Putting in some water,” he thought, “will mean water aplenty.”
So, the man reached into his knapsack. He fumbled around and found a clear water bottle that was half-filled. He poured the contents into the well.
Then, after waiting a bit, he lowered the bucket into the well, listening for a splash. But there was none. When he pulled the bucket up again, it was empty. “What’s happening?” he wondered to himself.
Night came, and the man fell asleep against the well. In the morning, he walked through the valley gathering into his water bottle what moisture he could find – dew on blades of grass, moisture stored in roots, small pools of water in tree trunks. He then emptied what he had gathered into the well. “This time the priming will work,” he thought.
But, again, the bucket came back empty. He was becoming thirstier and thirstier. Day after day, he gathered what water he could to prime the well. And, each day, he reminded himself, “I must put in, to take out.” But, again and again, the bucket came back empty.
Then one day a woman appeared over the valley’s ridge. As she approached the man, she noticed the empty bucket and the man’s bottle filled with his morning’s collection of water, she said. “You look exhausted. But why the bucket? You have enough in your water bottle. Why not quench your thirst?”
The man shook his head. “I cannot. The water I collected is not for drinking. It’s for the well. When I have poured enough into the well, I will draw out as much as I want.”
The woman listened to the man. Then, peering into the well, she said, “This well has no spring beneath it.”
The man stiffened. “All wells have springs. That is what makes them wells.”
“Not this one,” she replied. “This is a dry well. It might hold water for a time, but it can’t make water. Any water you pour into it seeps away into the ground below.”
The man’s voice grew sharp. “You’re wrong. I have put too much into this well for that to be true.”
The woman shrugged, “My friend, drink the water you’ve collected. Forget the well. It’s dry.” She had nothing more to say and continued on her way.
The wind moved across the mouth of the well, echoing the same hollow silence the man had heard when he first came upon it. Again, the man poured water from his bottle into the well, lowered the bucket, and then pulled it up.
Bill, this is a remarkable essay. What strikes me most is that your critique is not simply that the Roadmap is inadequate, but that even a theoretically excellent roadmap collides with the deeper operating logic of modern techno-industrial society. The Roadmap asks the global system to move toward sufficiency, redistribution, public control of strategic assets, ecological limits, debt relief, and a "steady-state operating system." However, these objectives directly challenge the prevailing objective functions of modern institutions or scaled symbolic systems themselves: growth, accumulation, extraction, capital returns, geopolitical competition, and the continual expansion of material throughput.
This is where I think your analysis gets to the real mechanics of implementation failure. The obstacle is not merely insufficient knowledge, political will, or policy imagination. We have had decades of IPCC reports, climate agreements, ecological economics, degrowth scholarship, and increasingly sophisticated sustainability roadmaps. The question is no longer whether humanity understands the problem. The question is why implementation repeatedly fails despite that understanding.
From a game-theoretic perspective, the Roadmap presents a profound collective action problem. It requires virtually every dominant institution to voluntarily abandon the very objective functions that enabled its success. Elites are therefore not necessarily acting irrationally by resisting such proposals; they are responding rationally to the rules of the current game or symbolic adaptive environment. For corporations, governments, financial institutions, and even nation states, growth, competitive advantage, capital accumulation, resource acquisition, and geopolitical influence remain the dominant payoff functions. Unilaterally adopting steady-state principles would often mean sacrificing competitiveness, political influence, market position, financial returns, or strategic leverage while others continue optimizing under the existing game rules. Within the current institutional landscape, resistance therefore becomes the payoff-maximizing strategy.
At the same time, the broader population occupies a different, yet equally rational, strategic position. Modern techno-industrial society progressively organizes access to life's necessities through institutional participation. Employment provides income, but income is only one component of a much broader web of dependency. Debt obligations, mortgages, pensions, healthcare, education, insurance, banking systems, digital identity, communications platforms, energy infrastructure, food supply chains, transportation networks, and increasingly the technological ecosystems through which people work, transact, and socialize all become intertwined with participation in the existing institutional order. As these interdependent systems deepen and become more tightly coupled, exiting (or even significantly disrupting) the existing system carries immediate and tangible costs. Individuals therefore continue participating not because they necessarily endorse the long-term trajectory, but because remaining within the existing institutional framework or game minimizes near-term losses relative to highly uncertain alternatives. From an evolutionary game-theoretic perspective, both elites and ordinary participants are responding adaptively to their local incentive environments, even while those individually rational behaviours collectively reinforce an ecologically maladaptive global outcome.
This is why your conclusion resonates so deeply. It suggests that implementation failure is not principally a failure of knowledge, ethics, or leadership, but an emergent equilibrium generated by the architecture of the system itself. In my own work, I have described this as a loss-dominance equilibrium: once institutional dependencies become sufficiently deep, preserving the existing gameboard becomes the individually rational strategy for nearly every actor, despite broad recognition that the collective trajectory is ecologically and socially unsustainable.
One implication that I find particularly compelling is that these equilibria may not simply be maintained by institutions but progressively strengthened through evolutionary selection. Institutions whose objective functions reward perpetual growth, extraction, competitive advantage, and accumulation create persistent selection pressures favouring the behavioural strategies most effective within those environments. Over time, this generates a recursive feedback loop: institutional architectures increasingly reward behavioural traits optimized for the existing payoff structure, while alternative organizational logics become progressively less competitive. The persistence of the system therefore becomes not merely ideological or economic, but evolutionary.
That is why I found your closing observation so haunting. These Roadmaps reveal inviting roads not taken that cannot be taken, not because they are intellectually deficient or technically impossible, but because the existing institutional architecture has organized incentives, dependencies, and power in ways that make meaningful transformation strategically prohibitive. If that diagnosis is correct, then the challenge before us is not simply designing better economic models, but understanding how to alter the incentive structures and dependency structures that keep humanity locked into these rigid and stable equilibria. In the end, what we are facing might be a selection problem….A human maladaptation syndrome if you will :) “…And I go… in fear.”
Greg, this is a wonderful 'game theoretical' assessment and paraphrasing of my arguement. The key to our predicament is here, your words: "...implementation failure is not principally a failure of knowledge, ethics, or leadership, but an emergent equilibrium generated by the architecture of the system itself." Exactly so. The ideological and consequent operational and physical structures of MTI culture produce an equilibrium from which there is no practical escape for anyone, whether 'perpetrator' or victim.
The question posed by my human maladaptation syndrome, particularly combined with your psychopathic selection hypothesis, is whether there is any possible, fundamentally different, outcome. Is the human behavioural repertoire, (which evolved in paleolithic times) capable of generating a viable alternative in the context of large-scale societies and attendant institutions? Can any stable, humane way of being 'emerge' from the human genome interacting with the structural and functional properties of a largely synthetic or symbolic 'civilization'?
Bill,
Thank you again for such a thoughtful response. I've found myself thinking about your question quite a bit over the past day because I suspect it gets to the heart of where The Human Maladaptation Syndrome HMS and PSH genuinely begin to intersect.
My answer is ultimately a cautious one. I do think a fundamentally different outcome is possible, but I highly doubt that it can emerge within the current MTI operating system. The question, as I see it, is no longer simply whether human beings possess sufficient empathy, intelligence, or cooperative capacity. Humans clearly possess a remarkably broad behavioural repertoire. The deeper question is whether the symbolic gameboard within which that repertoire is expressed permits those capacities to become evolutionarily stable at an enormous scale.
As I understand it, HMS identifies the evolutionary predicament. Human cognition evolved under Paleolithic tribal conditions characterized by repeated interaction, direct reciprocity, reputation, kinship, and immediate ecological feedback. MTI civilization represents an environment whose structural and functional properties differ profoundly from those conditions. Where PSH attempts to extend that argument is by asking a related question: once MTI civilization emerges as a synthetic symbolic environment, what kinds of behavioural architectures does symbolic selection begin favouring?
This is where I think our frameworks complement one another. HMS describes the mismatch. PSH attempts to describe the evolutionary dynamics operating within that mismatch.
One thought that continues to strike me is that MTI civilization is not merely a technological achievement or an economic system. It is also a symbolic operating system. Markets, money, banking, finance, corporations, bureaucracies, legal systems, media, digital platforms, technological infrastructures, and nation states collectively mediate access to food, housing, employment, healthcare, education, legitimacy, mobility, security, and political influence. Participation within those symbolic institutions increasingly determines survival itself.
As I argued in my previous comment, this creates an emergent equilibrium. What I have been wondering since reading your response is why such equilibria appear so extraordinarily resistant to voluntary change, and its something I'm supporting in an adjacent mathematical paper.
Game theory offers part of the answer. Once the costs of unilateral deviation from the game become immediate and concentrated while the benefits of cooperation remain delayed, uncertain, and dependent upon the behaviour of many other actors, individually rational strategies continually reproduce collectively maladaptive outcomes. Institutional economics adds another layer. As financial systems, labour markets, governments, legal systems, energy infrastructures, global supply chains, technological platforms, and bureaucratic institutions become significantly interdependent, they develop powerful forms of path dependence, institutional complementarity, increasing returns, and lock-in. Altering one component increasingly requires reorganizing many others simultaneously. Behavioural economics points in a similar direction through loss aversion and status quo effects, while complex systems theory suggests that tightly coupled systems with reinforcing feedbacks become extremely resistant to incremental reorganization. None of these perspectives alone explains our predicament, but taken together they suggest why large-scale symbolic equilibria become remarkably stable.
This is where I think PSH contributes something additional. Symbolic selection does not simply operate within that institutional architecture; it may progressively stabilize it. Behavioural architectures capable of maximizing symbolic reward under conditions of abstraction, delayed consequence, anonymity, and weak accountability acquire disproportionate symbolic success. The objective is not harm itself but symbolic reward. Harm matters primarily insofar as it alters expected symbolic payoff. If symbolic reward can be increased through deception, manipulation, coercion, regulatory capture, narrative control, rule modification, and the externalization of costs (and those strategies remain difficult to detect and are insufficiently punished) then they can become locally adaptive. Instrumental actors consequently acquire disproportionate influence over the objective functions, incentive structures, and rules governing future symbolic competition. Symbolic selection therefore becomes recursive. The behavioural architectures most successful under the existing game increasingly acquire the capacity to preserve and reproduce that very game.
This also helps clarify what I mean by the entrapment dynamics described in my book. Entrapment is not merely institutional dependency. It is the progressive compression of the available strategy space for game participants. Once access to life's necessities is routed through the existing symbolic architecture, adaptation itself becomes strategically constrained. Workers, corporations, political leaders, financial institutions, and nation states may all recognize the long-term trajectory, yet each incurs immediate and concentrated losses by deviating from game participation while the benefits of cooperation remain uncertain and contingent upon the behaviour of others. The equilibrium therefore persists not because it is humane, efficient, or ecologically viable, but because continuation becomes strategically less costly than departure for nearly every major class of actor (as stated previously).
This is why I continue to think Loss-Dominant Equilibrium is an important part of the story. It is my attempt to describe a macro-scale condition in which game-theoretic coordination problems, institutional lock-in, dependency formation, and symbolic selection converge into a single self-reinforcing equilibrium. Adaptation becomes substantially more difficult because the operating system itself continuously reproduces the conditions required for its own persistence.
If that interpretation is broadly correct, then perhaps collapse is not simply the consequence of ecological overshoot, nor merely of human maladaptation. It may emerge from the interaction between the two. HMS begins from the observation that the behavioural repertoire of Homo sapiens evolved under Paleolithic tribal conditions but is now expressed within the radically different structural and functional conditions of MTI civilization. PSH suggests that symbolic selection operating within that environment progressively favours behavioural architectures optimized for success under its prevailing objective functions. Those successful behavioural architectures reshape institutions, deepen dependency, compress the available strategy space of game participants through PSH dynamics, and stabilize Loss-Dominant Equilibria. Collapse, therefore, is not intentional, but the long-run consequence of globally maladaptive equilibria becoming evolutionarily stable.
That brings me back to your original question. I suspect that the central issue is not whether humans are capable of cooperation. We plainly are. The more difficult question is whether MTI symbolic civilizations possess sufficient adaptive capacity to reorganize their own operating systems before material reality reorganizes them instead. Historically, major institutional transformations often appear to follow periods in which ecological, energetic, epidemiological, military, or economic realities overwhelm the existing symbolic order. The unresolved question is whether a planetary civilization can voluntarily reconfigure the symbolic selection environment before those external constraints impose their own reorganization.
If that is the right question, then perhaps HMS and PSH are describing different levels of the same process. HMS explains the evolutionary predicament. PSH attempts to explain the evolutionary dynamics that unfold within it. Together, they leave us with what may be the defining question of our time: can we consciously construct symbolic institutions in which cooperative, reciprocal, and ecologically regenerative behavioural architectures become more adaptive than extractive ones? I wonder whether that is the real challenge before us.
“When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”
Bleak news...
Nature Communications,
“Evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo”, by Katerina Harvati and Mark Hubbe.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74739-w
Homo sapiens encephalization is now thought to be not a product of directional selection but of stabilizing selection! Imagine that!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilizing_selection
“Stabilizing selection is a type of natural selection in which the population mean stabilizes on a particular non-extreme trait value.” [...]
“Stabilizing selection causes the narrowing of the phenotypes seen in a population. This is because the extreme phenotypes are selected against, causing reduced survival in organisms with those traits.” Wikipedia
What does this tell me as for your PSHypothesis? That “psychopathy” is probably the non-extreme trait / phenotype that guided the species in this predicament... Wow...
The researchers say:
“Furthermore, we cannot rule out the possibility that linear directional selection played a role under more complex evolutionary scenarios, such as punctuated equilibrium models”
(Evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo, Nature Communications/Mark Hubbe and Katerina Harvati)
And the researchers of the above mentioned publication conclude with the following:
“In conclusion, our results are consistent with previous work suggesting a limited role for gradual directional selection in human evolution and underscore the importance of stabilizing selection and constraints, which our analyses strongly supported relative to other evolutionary processes.”
(Evolutionary drivers of encephalization and facial reduction in the genus Homo, Nature Communications/Mark Hubbe and Katerina Harvati)
Oh-my-God. Not good news for “anatomically-modern-humans”.
Psychopaths by necessity or by choice? This question remains...
What to say anymore? Is there anything one can “propose”?
Thank you kindly for sharing, George. This is extremely fascinating based on a quick perusing of the first article you shared. I will continue perusing most definitely :)
Also, if you’re interested you can check out a mathematical paper I’m working on that supports PSH (it is accessible to non-mathematicians as well I believe). Link to article here: https://zenodo.org/records/21225929
Hello Greg,
your ideas sound compelling. I stand at this: “The persistence of the system therefore becomes not merely ideological or economic, but evolutionary.”
Let’s examine from your perspective/hypothesis, the individually rational strategy that applies to “nearly every actor” and the persistence of the system not by virtue of ideology or economics but of evolution, a real-life example which puzzles me: the Covid pandemic crisis management.
The Covid pandemic was not simply about a health issue. It was about policies, measures applied uniformly and almost universally. I wonder, what might be the cause that made people disagree and divide upon this matter? In any case, the Covid pandemic is a discrete, unique and universal circumstance of the contemporary world, where everybody was faced with both a personal/individual and societal responsibility and was called upon, imperatively, to make a decision: Either/Or.
Since the evaluation of the effects of the Covid crisis is still ongoing and the conclusions remain controversial, I think it would be fruitful to examine such a case through the lens of evolution (societal-anthropological/ontological) that you hypothesize here.
I am in full agreement with your argument.
However...
Even after all that, I don't see this document as an MTI Society wrecking ball - no wrecking ball is needed! The status quo will collapse on its own, as you so often point out. Agreed - this roadmap will never be used to bring down the flawed systems.
AND YET...
I still think it useful to do as much homework as we can on how we might avoid the same flawed societal structures in the future, based on the chance (probably a good one) that some H. sapiens will survive the collapse. Pockets may well emerge from the resulting global anarchy and chaos that need a new set of operating procedures.
Our invented More is ALWAYS Better value system (measuring success by a number) is a bit like our spent nuclear waste. The best we can do is to flag that toxicity as something to be avoided for as long as the message can be communicated.
Thank you for this. I think the article is both sobering and largely right in its critique of growth economics, overshoot, and the profound inadequacy of most “roadmaps” that leave the deeper operating system untouched.
Where I wonder if there is still an assumption worth challenging is around the nature of humanity itself.
The piece seems to assume, perhaps understandably, that human beings will continue to function primarily as extractive and consumptive agents within the ecosphere. On that basis, collapse or contraction becomes almost inevitable. But I am not convinced that extractive humanity is the only humanity available to us.
From the perspective of Human Systems Ecology, the problem is not humanity as such. The problem is disembedded humanity — human beings cut off from place, season, limits, community, ancestry, ritual, obligation and the living systems that actually regulate us. When humans are placed inside extractive systems, trained by extractive stories, and rewarded for extractive behaviour, they become extractive. But that is not the same as saying extraction is our fixed nature.
There is another possibility: that human culture, at sufficient scale, could become a regenerative layer of the biosphere rather than a parasitic one. Not through another industrial-scale management program, and not through green versions of the same old growth logic, but through a fundamental shift in identity and relationship. Humans could come to understand themselves not as consumers of an external “environment”, but as ecological participants nested within living systems.
That may sound idealistic, but in one sense it is the simplest shift imaginable: a change of mind. Not a change of opinion, but a change in the ground from which perception arises. If the self is understood as separate, the world becomes resource. If the self is understood as ecological, the world becomes kin, context and responsibility.
This is where I think Human Systems Ecology may add something to the overshoot conversation. It does not deny the biophysical limits. It takes them seriously. But it also asks what kind of human being is capable of living within limits without experiencing them only as deprivation. My sense is that limits become liveable when they are held inside relationship — to land, food, water, children, ancestors, community and future generations.
So perhaps the question is not simply whether the current roadmap can be taken by the civilisation that growth built. It probably cannot. The deeper question is whether enough people, places and communities can undergo the ecological conversion of identity required to become regenerative before contraction makes that conversion non-negotiable.
The problem is not that humans are ecological. The problem is that we have forgotten how to be ecological well.
You might be interested to learn that before the rise of civilizations there is evidence of humans living in large settlements that were self governed and non-hierarchical. They were indeed place based, altho they also travelled hundreds of kms for trade and to diversify the gene pool. These settlements had small footprints. We may have started as isolated hunter gatherers, but our social nature led us to cooperate in much larger groups - but without dominance hierarchies. Google Luke Kemp for links.
"there is evidence of humans living in large settlements that were self governed and non-hierarchical."
In my informal survey, I've come to the conclusion that the invention of grain agriculture is the culprit. For the first time in human history, grain allowed the accumulation of wealth. Grain agriculture independently arose some six or seven thousand years ago, in places like Mesopotamia (wheat), India and China (rice), and Mesoamerica (corn).
However, about the same time in coastal British Columbia, a civilization arose that was non-hierarchical. It is difficult to research, because it left no pyramids, temples, and other enduring monuments. It was centred near present-day Hazelton, where dozens of non-native varieties of hazelnuts from as far as Alberta and Oregon can be found.
Unlike grain, hazelnuts go rancid and cannot be stored without modern refrigeration.
yes, the grain surplus made a huge difference in terms of what was possible. Once there was reliable surplus it had to be managed. Elite dominance evolved and became acceptable to ensure the surplus continued (at least that was what the elite narrative said). Other means of organizing the surplus (its production and distribution) could have evolved, but didnt. Dominant personalities took over, supported by the presence of better weapons, to enforce their rule. And we've been stuck with this model ever since. But most of human existence was spent with a very different kind of organization. We are capable of better. Luke Kemp has summarized much of this and is worth a read or view.
A wonderfully honest, dismal synopsis of the human predicament, by illustrating the Roadmap that would be needed to even mitigate collapse, and why that Roadmap can and will never be taken. Thanks Bill!
I am going to comment with the same hammerhead obduracy that I have always done here : why is there only the most fleeting of off-hand references to the major ultrasocial force driving overshoot towards extinction in this otherwise excellent and wise essay?
2 whole uses of the word "corporations" in this Olympian essay?
The United Nations has zero record of halting the invasive overgrowth of corporations and state corporations in our lifetime. Ultra-extreme economic inequality, massive immiseration of the majority of living humans, biodiversity flattening, a thousand other biosocial failures - those are all direct products, that is, basic externalizations, of the living, breathing entity that is the global corporate supersystem.
Does anyone in this laudable report, or anyone typing away in Substackland, have the slightest testable or viable idea of how to cut into this controlling entity? Of course not, not ever. The central perpetrator is never mentioned, and I'm not sure why.
Quote from the article. Our predicaments stem from long before corporations existed.
"H. sapiens for 350,000 years, but so-called ‘civilization’ for only ~6000 years. "
and we are living in a world we are not evolved to deal with:
"This means that the human brain and behavioural repertoire evolved in, and are adapted to, life in small foraging groups or hunter-gatherer bands living in relatively unchanging, spatially limited home ranges. This suggests, in turn, that the human psyche and innated associated behaviours may well be maladapted to many of the physical and social dimensions of life in large-scale societies."
Corporations are a symptom of our dilemma, not a cause.
Mark is correct. Corporations are a symptom, not a cause. So what IS that symptom? What cause is it pointing too? Why are corporations different than any other group of humans? I believe this to be a critical question to answer.
The value system of (assuming business) corporations is distinct from general human values in a very clear way. Success for a corporation is not tied to any qualitative natural/human values. The closest they ever came to this was long ago, when a very small few of them were created to achieve a very specific project and then dissolved once the goal had been reached. (In other words, the concept of "enough" was baked in.)
Beyond that, WE invented business corporations with a singular goal in mind: to maximize virtual wealth. We could stop right there with those three words. Virtual wealth is a number. Numbers are limitless. Therefore, there IS NO maximum. More is Always Better. In those three words, it should be obvious that we invented theoretically *immortal* structures, (eventually giving them the same rights as humans), and demanded that they embark on an impossible crusade that could only ever result in non-stop consumption on a finite planet.
So, yes, corporations are only a symptom, but they point directly at the flawed value system underpinning it all. Measuring success by number.
Martin lists "ultra-extreme economic inequality, massive immiseration of the majority of living humans, biodiversity flattening, a thousand other biosocial failures". Such things did in fact exist before corporations did, but they are all based on the idea that More is Always Better - something that, by the way, also results in overpopulation!
"More is Always Better" may seem like a tautology. Of course - more is Always better. And yet this concept exists nowhere else in the natural world. To *everything* there is a concept of "enough", "sufficiency" - for food, water, warmth, progeny, even happiness chemicals. I do not question the Maximum Power Principle of individuals maximizing the consumption of available resources, but all of that is subject to both external *and* internal feedback loops of sufficiency and negative feedback.
I call this phenomenon our Value Crisis.
Mark that really got me thinking about this whole topic that Dr. Rees so well discussed in this essay. Thanks.
Hi Sandy, the way to approach it perhaps is to imagine what would happen if we arrested or assassinated all the current elites, Musk, Bezos, etc, oil company CEOs etc then basically stole their assets for the public redistribution, but we didn't change anything else. What would happen?
The next tier down, some being their surplus offspring would then buy up all those assets and repeat the cycle.
Evolutionary drivers coupled with physics are a bit brutal. I would argue that, to thrive sustainably and alongside all the other 10 million species also thriving, we would have to alter evolution itself. IE get rid of the MPP in some way, species wide for us, simultaneously. That is, to me, the magnitude of the predicament we are in.
Is that possible? Can we even imagine it? I don't think so.
Hi Mark. I agree that the MPP (Maximum Power Principle) is a real kicker. And yet, the MPP applies to *every* species, and always has. So I don't think that MPP alone is the problem.
I attempt to open and exploration of this here: https://thevaluecrisis.substack.com/p/overcoming-the-greatest-threat
I would love your comments on that post.
Andrew, great to discover your substack, which I will explore in more depth later. For now, just to say that I have also been trying to reconcile the MPP with our current predicament and how it clashes with successful adaptation. Some ways of looking at it are in terms of short vs long term adaptation, or in terms of what is biologically determined and what is culturally determined. If one takes a long term view then choosing to act on the MPP clearly does not make any sense given the abnormal growth in population and consumption our species has brought us to. We can choose how and when we apply the MPP. It is not a biological determinant of our behaviour, but an option we can choose to use when needed. If adaptation is necessary for survival, we are fortunate to have evolved culture as a means of influencing human behaviour. We've certainly messed it up recently, but we can still choose to limit consumption and strive for a steady state economy a la Daly.
MPP is not something we can choose to act on or not. It is simply the observed principle that all species follow, innately.
At least you two are thinking about this issue, but I still find so much to object to - you don’t seem to get the fundamental issue at all.
Symptom/cause - come on, it’s much deeper than that. What were once symptoms, are now causes, and even the cause. You two are like gun nuts, objecting to any focus on the mass availability of guns in the US as the primary drivers of insane levels of gun violence in the US. Was there lethal violence in our human past. Yes, but the exponential proliferation of guns makes gun homicide in the US orders of magnitude more horrific than just having knives and fists around.
Same with transnational corporations and state corporations. Our propensity for organized cooperative ultrasocial killing predated the arrival of them, but this evolved mechanism for absorbing the least regulated, most insidious forms of killing and control now runs all social institutions, from the pathetic courts, the subservient higher education mills, the religions, politics of course, everything.
Ants and termites, our fellow ultrasocial species, don’t waste time debating what’s a symptom, what’s a cause, they self-organize in highly destructive social hierarchies. Values don’t matter to ants, or termites, or us - fear of others does, fear of ostracism, fear of losing place or advantage, which is why US corporations have virtually no federal oversight, and only the lightest of state oversight from the laughable corrupt and captured state of Delaware, where they, the corporations, can choose to reside, though that’s now changing with the moron state of Texas now bidding to be their new host.
I don’t encourage talking past each other here in this limited forum. People getting nice paychecks from corporations love it when we either refuse to talk about them or adopt convenient excuses for their obvious insulated forms of ultra-criminality.
Where to begin, Martin? Your observation is not wrong. Yes, we have long developed a preference to measure value by number, but now that we have mega-corporations, things have gone to hell in a handcart. That is the math of exponential functions - such evolution is inevitable. And yes, if we could eliminate these monstrosities, the world would undoubtedly be a better place - sort of. This might be a bit simplistic though, don't you think?
You clearly don't like corporations (especially big ones), and yet I'll bet that you, like pretty much everyone, are motivated to increasing you own personal wealth whenever you can. (That would be a value that you share with corporations, but, because they have no other values to worry about, they are generally better at it than you.) I might even be willing to bet that you have investments, either directly or indirectly, that are striving to grow corporate value in order to produce a return for your portfolio or pension plan or whatever.
Your observation: "Values don’t matter to ants, or termites, or us - fear of others does, fear of ostracism, fear of losing place or advantage..." indicates to me that you have failed to grasp the usage of the term "values" in this conversation. Fair enough - such terms can have fuzzy definitions. (Any organism making a choice - even a tree deciding to grow up instead of down - has 'values' that matter.)
Your reference to "people getting nice paychecks from corporations" suggests to me that you are not one of those people. Lucky you. And yet, again like most people, if you *do* have a paying job, you recognize its criticality to your survival, and I think you would make a fuss if anyone suggested eliminating it. That is what a society based on numeric success and values is all about. (Not that you care about values, right?)
The "obvious insulated forms of ultra-criminality" that you speak of is unclear. Most corporate leaching from society is done under the existing laws, which greatly favour them. (Or were you thinking 'criminal' in the moral/values sense?) Regardless, the worst offences (legally as well as morally) no doubt happen at the very top.
Which brings us to the real crisis in the industrialized world today. Because it is NOT a conflict between left and right ideologies. That is simply a systemic ruse to disguise the fact that the real problem is the divide between the uber-rich and the 99.9%. And in a society where numbers hold all the power (not that values matter, right?), the governments will be run by the rich. Full stop. It's pretty much impossible to become uber-rich without several corporations making that happen. If you want to know why corporations seem to be insufficiently regulated and given free rein, you need look no further.
Finally, I have to presume from some inferences that you are presently a resident of the United States. As a Canadian, I have to cut you some slack. Suffering under the level of incomprehensible (and by that, I mostly mean incomprehensibly visible and blatant) corruption that you live under now, I fully sympathize with your frustration at "all social institutions, from the pathetic courts, the subservient higher education mills, the religions, politics of course, everything." The United States embodies the rule of number-based value systems perhaps better than any empire that we know of in written history. Wealth, votes, likes, views, profit margins, market share, ratings, acres, ownership, missile counts, military might, and yes, corporations are sacred to everything your country does. You are right to be upset.
I can't comment on why you don't see enough people trashing corporations on Substack. Perhaps you are simply not following the crowd that you seek. I'm sure they're out there. Still, another explanation might be the fact that many other writers recognize the problem as being slightly more complicated than what you envision.
You gave it the good Canadian go there, but there is also some buffering/spinning of the dial going on. Still, it's good to every once in a while air out some blasts of commentariate, just to see if there are any valuable pieces in the rubble. How is your your amateur psychology analysis from across the ether? Not bad, not great.
Corporations could not have been eliminated even in the most fanciful historical proposition, but they could have been regulated, held liable for their externalizations, subsumed under greater forces of social control - but they were not, not by any stretch of the term.
No, I am not personally motivated by "increasing you own personal wealth whenever you can," since I have a conscience, think about the lives of others in this world, etc. - but I accept the dictates of my social reality. Investments are just names on a spreadsheet, meaning disinvestment or adherence to corporate social responsibility is just fantasy.
There is no "law" on the books to effectively govern corporate predation, so yes, we as humans should always strive to define criminality according to actual actions. Surely by no we can accept that the law is fundamentally unjust.
Actually, rightist ideologies are definitely the problem, the winner, the cause, the death of humanity. Leftism, in whatever form of humanism you might define, was killed off by this invasive species. The 99.9 trope (where's that extra .9 come from?) is just an evasion of sociological reality - the numbers, like whatever you want to define as "values," are inherently obfuscating and ridiculous. The 1%, or the .1%, or the .001%, or whatever baseless number you want to invoke, are simply products of an anti-human supersystem, but they are human extensions of ourselves, as you do seem to point to. The lower level corporate drones are just as culpable for being dragged by this insanely out-of-control system as the miserable psychopaths at the heights that you define them.
Yeah, your crystal ball correctly identified my geographic location - but let's not let Canada play the poor liberal victim. Canadian mining companies are not staffed with moral exemplars. Mulrooney and Trudeau were not progressive icons.
Lastly, I'm not looking for Occupado-style "trashing" of corporations - pointless, given their totalitarian power. I just object, every now and then, and really for no good reason, to endless boring bullshit that never names the central perpetrator, of which Substack is certainly one.
Recent archaeological evidence indicates that humans lived in large settlements before the rise of civilizations. These settlements were self governing and largely egalitarian. People seemed to live lives of sufficiency rather than surplus. Civilizations emerged when surpluses could be consistently provided. Elite capture of how the surpluses were managed might be considered the critical turning point for humanity in terms of our current predicament. Fossil fuels and corporations accelerated a process already well entrenched in human activity. See Luke Kemp for details.
“Recent archeological evidence” as reflected in Occupado movement guru Graeber’s “Dawn of the Deal”? I’m not buying that cherry-picked pseudo-history view of my inherited species. Humans are ultrasocial intelligent killers - megafauna, other mammals, their own kind, and now their own necessary biological bases for self-survival. If there were a few instances of happy singalong relatively egalitarian settlements in our human history, those are nothing compared to the ultra-extreme economic and social inequality and techno war destruction that is our corporate-controlled destiny now.
Have a look at Luke Kemp's Goliath: the history and future of societal collapse. Humans are indeed capable of organized violence. Interestingly, there is no archaeological evidence of organized violence before civilizations emerged. Yes, there is evidence of violent exchanges, but at the level of interpersonal conflicts - and not even much of that. To accept evidence that humans lived in large egalitarian settlements with no organized violence for millennia is not to deny the destructiveness of the current corporate controlled system we now have. Nor is it necessary to assume these settlements were utopian and without real challenges. The point is they endured for millennia. Our natural state as social creatures is the former. Our challenge is how to reclaim that natural state and escape the destructiveness of our current much more recent predicament.
Oh, I've been exposed to Luke and his T-Shirt on podcasts, and it's more Olympian Hariri-style potted history that ends up with the glaze of instructive hopium ("don't be a dick') that is completely useless.
I'm not suggesting everything Kemp says makes sense. The issue is what life was like before civilization emerged. What is your evidence that organized violence was common during that period?
Excellent books on the horrific violence from earlier human societies exist downstairs all throughout my library - but I've got to go outside to have a drink with my wife.
I'm glad you looked at all these deeply researched books. Remember, though the word "cooperate" also refers to the ultrasocial ability of homo sapiens, "indigenous" in the term, to hunt together to drive megafauna to extinction. Where humans appear, extinction rates soar.
And as much as your comment reflects an honest attempt to grapple with this enormous and consequential subject, I see no evidence whatsoever that we humans of today have the slightest capacity to collectively "decide" anything about our fate. "We," in the sense of collective social power, refers only to the corporate capitalized class.
Agree that the "we" doesn't refer to the species level, but perhaps evolutionary adaptation never did. Those that adapted survived and those that didn't were gone. The elite narrative (how I'd term your notion of corporate control) is very successful at conning people into believing the system the elite have established is the best ( + TINA). But there are many examples of small scale "we" groups who seem to have some sense of the con and are working along cooperative lines to prepare an exit of the elite system. Maybe they will prove to be adaptive, maybe not. But I suggest they are worth acknowledging and promoting. Cheers
"As Roadmap illustrates, it is entirely possible to conceive of an equitable steady-state economy if ..."
No "if" is needed. It isn't possible, for me at least, to conceive of such an economy. You rightly nip that hope in the bud but one of the other reasons it is inconceivable is that "caps on resource use" does nothing to make non-renewable resource use sustainable. A steady state economy is impossible, even for a short time, since as resources become scarcer and harder to access, the economy needs to grow in order to increase the complexity needed to access and refine more difficult to reach and lower quality ores. This is in addition to all of the reasons you illustrate for such a roadmap to be delusion.
On one level, any economy is doomed since Earth will be cindered in a few billion years and many other unsurvivable events may occur long befor then. However, it is interesting (if not practical) to think about alternatives on a humanity-meaningful time scale. Your objection to 'steady-state' assumes dependence on non-renewables. Non-human species have always had more or less steady-state economies (material relationships within their ecosystems). Even Hominins lived for hundreds of thousands of years using mostly renewable resources, the products of photosysnthesis (food and natural fibre), and a bit of stone. Combine this with very measured uses of certain metalic non-renewables and a population of a few tens of millions, and H. sapiens could exist in what would be a virtual steady-state for a very long time--certainly thousands of years. Admittedly, this is not going to happen voluntarily, but may be the best our species can manage should there be survivors after the crash (of course, there may not be, if the crash is due to nuclear stupidity).
Oh yes, provided the capability to work existing, extracted, metal resources is retained, a far smaller population could continue with something slightly up on hunting and gathering for perhaps thousands of years. But they wouldn't be able to extract any more raw materials, and I'm not sure they'd be able to recover and rework metals (including rusted metals) for that long.
My take is that the only way of life that is potentially sustainable is hunting and gathering. I say "potentially" because it isn't guaranteed, especially with tool use, to only hunt and gather food resources at or below their renewal rates.
I doubt many people would think of a hunter-gatherer society as having an economy, so the phrase "steady state economy" is perhaps inappropriate, in this case. Steady state advocates, though, believe (it is a faith) that a modern society can thrive in a steady state for ever (up to the end of life on Earth).
Still, a few thousand years would do me!
Basically, I agree, except by functional definitions, hunter-gathering with exchange or trade would certainly qualify as an 'economy'. Also, I and many of my colleagues/friends are steady-state advocates but none believe that 'modern' (high intensity) society can be steady-state. I don't even subscribe to the notion of a circular economy (that's a longish story).
I'm having a hard time imagining what hunter-gatherer tribes would be exchanging or trading. Certainly, that happens with contacted hunter-gatherer tribes embedded in modernity but if there are only hunter-gatherer tribes, not so much, if at all.
Even then, steady-state would only be possible during fairly stable environmentally and ecologically stable times, which will always be temporary (but, again, a few thousand years would do me).
my (limited) knowledge of the archaeological data is that during the paleolithic period, human groups routinely travelled hundreds of km annually to trade and expand their gene pool. Our species succeeded in part because of this expanded gene pool. The trade may have been for certain kinds of stones used for tools or art, for example. The evidence for this is pretty clear.
Yeah, some basic trading, I'm sure went on but I'm not sure when that started though the kinds of things you mentioned (plus probably trading techniques) I personally wouldn't think of as an economy. Still, we know how that all worked out up to the present time. Steady state may be technically possible in that era (at least for thousands of years, even if basic metal tools were traded) but, given what actually happened, it is bound to eventually fall apart, just like it is now.
Mike, you are correct that the idea of a steady state economy has been corrupted to assume it could mean simply not growing anymore. Folks who believe that simply haven't done their research. A genuine steady state economy could only occur with material throughput at a rate below the regenerative capacity of the resources consumed. Herman Daly's work describes this well.
PS. What we know about hunter-gatherer societies is that they have lots of leisure and high levels of life satisfaction. It may look dismal from our privileged positions, but that's our problem.
Swidden agriculture (where it's possible) and hunter-gathering (also where possible) will support ~100-200 million for many thousands of years. I don't think we should sell such a society short--we needn't be hi-tech to be 'advanced.'
Regarding your comment "A steady state economy is impossible, even for a short time, since as resources become scarcer and harder to access, the economy needs to grow in order to increase the complexity needed to access and refine more difficult to reach and lower quality ores." A steady state economy is inevitable, altho it's highly unlikely it will be planned. Yes, the economy would need to grow to access more lower quality resources, but that is exactly why the economy will stop growing at some point; there won't be sufficient non-renewable resources to bother extracting. Humans lived for millennia on renewable resources and that will happen again if some humans make it thru what's coming. Planning for a steady state economy is the sensible thing to do, but we're not being sensible, and we likely dont have time, given how rapidly irreversible ecological tipping points are approaching.
I agree that a steady state economy is inevitable though I'm not sure many people would refer to it as an economy. Planning for a modern steady state economy is doomed to failure, for the reason I mentioned. If it is ever planned and executed, the failure to reach a steady state could mean an attempted return to unsustainable growth.
An economy is basically people working together to meet their collective needs. This makes sense because we have both physical and social needs that are most efficiently met by cooperating. This can be done sustainably because these universal basic needs are satiable. I'm not sure what you might mean by "a modern steady state economy" as together those terms are an oxymoron. No, a "modern" industrial technology economy can never be a steady state economy because it would require both high levels of cheap energy and unsustainable material throughput. A steady state economy has to rely on the sustainable use of renewable resources, and a much smaller population that operates within earth's carrying capacity. Material throughput has to be below the earth's regenerative capacity to be sustainable.
Wait a minute... are you suggesting their "roadmap{ ain't gonna happen? Say it aint so, Bill!
Do any of these wonderful academic endeavors really ever make it except for the things that destroy everything like data centers?
“If history and the momentum of MTI culture are any guide, Roadmap has less chance of taking flight than does a butterfly glued to a lead brick.”
Professor Rees, you certainly inspired me and this comes like a weird synchronicity because I was thinking almost the same thing as your “glued butterfly” metaphor. This is so strange! So, here is what I was thinking.
The whole MTI venture reminds me of a commercial airplane, full of happy and unaware tourists/consumers, ready to take off. Taxiing casually on the runway, the pilots prepare for take-off procedures. All seem in place. Initiation of take-off sequence. Plane accelerates on runway.
Suddenly a “bang” is heard, but it is too isolated, too short, too vague to disrupt the happy atmosphere and the “good vibrations”. Hey, we’re on holidays!
That explosion was the sound of engines failing (bio-psycho-physical limits). No other sound disrupts the happy atmosphere after this brief disturbance. It was too vague for our tourists to take notice and start worrying (insert BAU here). A critical disturbance that now poses a severe threat.
Engines failed. And they failed at the exact point where the co-pilot uttered the critical words: “V-1”. V-1, point of no return. Hands-off throttles! Plane still on runway, plane must take off. There is not enough runway to stop. Co-pilot: “Rotate” (insert “roadmap” here)...
Actually, there was a flight resembling this imaginary scenario, but it was the outlier, an extreme outlier. Flight 411 of Olympic Airways, from Athens to NY, back in 1978. The Captain was the experienced Greek pilot Sifis Migadis, a pilot whose ingenuity, intuition, sound judgement, focus and quick decision making, all combined, have accomplished the impossible. He saved a doomed Boeing 747, and averted a tragedy that could be the worst in Hellenic aviation. This mystery still puzzles aviation industry and cycles. They ran simulations. “Roadmaps”. All simulations resulted in crash. The plane was considered lost, virtually impossible to fly. Sifis Migadis broke all rules and protocols in order to accomplish this.
What the MTI aberration suffers from is taking “human ingenuity” for granted. This is a serious disease. Not only MTI aberration is taking, say, a Sifis for granted, saving a lost airplane, but doing so by drafting and following roadmaps. This is the ultimate paradox. In this respect, MTI agents (mis)identify themselves as Sifis, a mis-reading of the situation, if nothing more dark. Human ingenuity exists, there is no doubt about it. But it is rare. Circumstance makes it stand out, not “roadmaps”. One cannot force ingenuity into existence, neither assume it. Ingenuity happens as a miracle, where even “roadmaps” bend.
Some remarks on your second footnote on “growth”.
Interestingly enough, Marx deemed Ancient Hellenes as the “juvenile” phase of humanity (Grundrisse). Now we are “grown up”, at last! But what comes up must come down. The “childhood” phase of humanity implies senescence and a death too. And since Marx’s frame of reference is history... one can imagine the rest.
Secondly, one cannot borrow a juvenile humanity’s socio-political regime (aka democracy) happening within its presumed still underdeveloped/non evolved society, and then pretend that... it has grown up. There is no authentic democracy counted in millions or billions. Actually, the West deems democracy (the kratos of demos) as its apex. The “juvenile phase of humanity” thought of it only as an experiment, limited in time and numbers, and under this term it agreed entering the experiment. No guarantees. In fact, today there is a grotesque semblance of Athenian democracy, full of “depositories”... Now, how come that Greeks knew that: “ὦ Σόλων, Σόλων, Ἕλληνες ἀεὶ παῖδές ἐστε, γέρων δὲ Ἕλλην οὐκ ἔστιν.” (Oh Solon, you Hellenes always remain children, there is no old Hellene - Timaeus/Plato). Those folks had some serious self-awareness, it appears, and anthropological self-check mechanisms.
Moreover, Marx assumed that mythology disappears with the real domination over natural forces, which of course could not be farther from truth. Not because mythology is “childish”, but because nature has never been conquered. We now witness the aftermath of man’s presumed “supremacy” over nature...
Thank you Dr. Rees for writing this in such a straightforward manner. I usually read your pieces twice, there's so much to digest and understand, and I just want to tell you you are so appreciated. Your comment section is excellent as always. - Sandy-
The United Nations is simply a collection of politicians and bureaucrats seeking to expand political power beyond national borders under the guise of moral causes.
Like all bureaucracies, it has a vested interest in perpetuating itself, increasing its influence, and advancing the careers of those within it.
Funded by other people's money, politicians and bureaucrats have every incentive to expand their power, influence, and budgets rather than solve the problems they claim to address.
The analysis of institutional lock-in and game theory is rigorous and correct. Yet the root variable remains unaddressed.
The obstacle isn't just the system; it's the operator. People no longer know how to be human. People don't know how to be people.
We have forgotten the baseline behaviors required to exist within ecological limits. Until we reclaim that fundamental capacity—learning to be people again—no roadmap, policy, or structural fix will hold. If we solve the human equation, the rest becomes solvable. Without it, we are just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
While I agree with the analysis, and the futility of trying to make the changes that would be necessary for MTI to avoid its inevitable collision course with self-destruction, I would like to point out that there are thousands of communities around the world that are actively involved in creating alternative societies which explicitly consider themselves to be a part of nature. As such they are explicitly creating spaces in which they will (hopefully) be prepared to survive the coming Armageddon. Many of these communities are organized within the international consortium "Territories of Life" (valuable information about this grouping is readily available on the Web.!
Absolutely so, David. In other writing and comments, I refer to such communities and smaller groups as 'lifeboats' and hold out hope that they don't get sucked down in the vortex created by the MTI Titanic as she goes down.
Thank you for reflecting on this bold vision.
Didn't read the whole thing, lost me at "we economists have done maths". Allright then, a spreadsheet of social ideals. With one column for how the basic economy is going to pay for it, "we just ask for more technology and stuffs, and shuffle things around until the spreadsheet balances".
Bill,
You have many of the parameters of the predicament correct.
ecological overshoot. (more consumption than production)
human’s activities displace all other activities
crustal resource depletion (deliveries of energy and mass decline)
limbic brain created civilization and can not manage the processes leading to outcomes.
here is one you could add to your list
Human existence has momentum — any changes causes injury.
But that does not mean homo sapiens will have to get crushed into a dark age or worse.
There are behaviors (they cause injuries) that can ferry humankind maintaining progress through Catton’s bottleneck. These behaviors can be implemented by a single rational actor. Because the act does not require institutional participation the act has a high probably of being implemented.
If that behavior is taken
The present global population will exit
the infrastructure will empty
their mass energy flows will stop.
the toxic residue could be cleaned up or sequestered.
A smaller new civilization (with a maintainable population, mass energy flows, with operational rules that
manage its momentum could be built and launched like lifeboats from the titanic by 2100
Finally, there could be between now and 2300, the develop in each member of the graduating constituency changes in cognitive abilities that dominate the function of our evolved limbic development. For example, The constituency has no discount rate. They learn from inference rather than experience. inference learning determines behavior.
I have been working on these components for 50 years. At amazon there are five books (Time blind book Series Jack Alpert) that chronicle my wrong turns and current trajectory.
Time Blind book 2 “Civilization’s Path Forward.” 2026 describes the activities and structure that produce a viable — that is a non injury producing civilization.
The single behavior that makes the activities in book 2 possible is the existing 8.4 billion people are successfully and irreversibly sterilized. (There is a mechanism to create the replacement population for the life boats who will not have any cultural content of the exiting population. )
I welcome everyone’s help there is much left to be designed, built, and implemented.
Jack Alpert PhD Director:
Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory
http://www.skil.org
(C) 913 708 2554 jackalpert@me.com
13617 W. 48th Street Shawnee, KS 66216
Jack's work 600 word summary
Well, said. Here's a parable that says it - with more clarity.
A Gaian parable about pouring our life force into an empty well. Inputs don’t necessarily produce outputs; sunk-cost thinking can betray us; and if we grasp for excess, we might fail to notice sufficiency.
The empty well
Once a man, while wandering in an arid and wind-swept valley, came upon an old well, its stones weathered and cool. He was thirsty, and the well promised an abundance of water.
So he lowered a bucket hanging over the opening into the well, anticipating a bucketful of fresh water. He would drink from the bucket; he would splash water on his face; he would drink some more.
But when he pulled the bucket up from the well, it was empty. What to do? He had once heard that if you prime a well with some water, its deep springs come to life. “Putting in some water,” he thought, “will mean water aplenty.”
So, the man reached into his knapsack. He fumbled around and found a clear water bottle that was half-filled. He poured the contents into the well.
Then, after waiting a bit, he lowered the bucket into the well, listening for a splash. But there was none. When he pulled the bucket up again, it was empty. “What’s happening?” he wondered to himself.
Night came, and the man fell asleep against the well. In the morning, he walked through the valley gathering into his water bottle what moisture he could find – dew on blades of grass, moisture stored in roots, small pools of water in tree trunks. He then emptied what he had gathered into the well. “This time the priming will work,” he thought.
But, again, the bucket came back empty. He was becoming thirstier and thirstier. Day after day, he gathered what water he could to prime the well. And, each day, he reminded himself, “I must put in, to take out.” But, again and again, the bucket came back empty.
Then one day a woman appeared over the valley’s ridge. As she approached the man, she noticed the empty bucket and the man’s bottle filled with his morning’s collection of water, she said. “You look exhausted. But why the bucket? You have enough in your water bottle. Why not quench your thirst?”
The man shook his head. “I cannot. The water I collected is not for drinking. It’s for the well. When I have poured enough into the well, I will draw out as much as I want.”
The woman listened to the man. Then, peering into the well, she said, “This well has no spring beneath it.”
The man stiffened. “All wells have springs. That is what makes them wells.”
“Not this one,” she replied. “This is a dry well. It might hold water for a time, but it can’t make water. Any water you pour into it seeps away into the ground below.”
The man’s voice grew sharp. “You’re wrong. I have put too much into this well for that to be true.”
The woman shrugged, “My friend, drink the water you’ve collected. Forget the well. It’s dry.” She had nothing more to say and continued on her way.
The wind moved across the mouth of the well, echoing the same hollow silence the man had heard when he first came upon it. Again, the man poured water from his bottle into the well, lowered the bucket, and then pulled it up.
The well was empty.