Efficiency, centralization, and lack of agency v. resilience
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Friday, March 28, 2025 15:44
VIEWED: 4079
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IMHO the Alberta tar sands should be left in the ground. Everything we do is fucking jury-rigged anyway, what should make me think that THIS time we'll do it right when we have such a long, illustrious history of screwing up our planet?
But while grousing about the fact that we're all living on a knife-edge, it occurred to me that even if we left the tar in the sand (a step in the right direction) we'd STILL be living on knife edge. Not because conservation isn't a good thing, but because we're still living in the paradigm that everything HAS to be "efficient" because... well, it just HAS to be. So everything is just-in-time, even food. Our power grid is run on the ragged edge. Everything is over-engineered and underbuilt, like the so-called Dreamliner. This mindless endless algorithm of efficiency has created a system with multiple points of catastrophic failure, for example when just-in-time meets earthquake.
I wondered what it would take for humans NOT to live on the edge. Not conservation. Conservation is necessary, but it's not going actually to ensure our survival.
What I came up with was that we would have to plan- not for some miserly cost-effective existance in which each human life is put on some sort of weigh-scale of efficiency- but for to plan for surplus.
So what would that mean?
It's such anathema to even THINK in those terms, I have a hard time envisioning it. Maybe food surpluses, stored everywhere. Things built to be easily repaired. The capacity to support any population at a basic level from the resources within 100 miles. More than enough forests for more than enough wood. An electrical grid that is 20% oversized.
What would it look like, and how could we change our thinking to be more like that?
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Oh, you might be wondering what the post has to do with the title.
One of the reasons why we don't plan for abundance is because prices would collapse if there was more than enough of everything for everyone. The reason for this drive to efficiency is because we all think that everything can be valued by market forces. It's all about business. Except that it's not.
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So, still thinking online... I guess it wasn't clear what I was getting at. Maybe if I went back to the beginning.
I was thinking that we live on the edge. But partway thru writing that we should not exploit the Canadian tar sands, I realized... even if we DID step back from that feat, we would STILL be living on the edge. Maybe we would be using up fewer resources, but we'd still be insecure.
Why?
Because we always have. Because that's what humans have done. In the past, we used to be limited by what our technology could do, but we ate, and bred, and spread as much as our technology allowed. Fire, agriculture, and antibiotics were major turning points. But we STILL ate, and bred, and spread to the limits of our resources. Learning to use non-human, non-animal energy ... now the limits of our resources aren't determined by our technology but by the planet. Even if we learn to conserve, will we still eat and breed and spread to the limits of our resources, living just one disaster away from... disaster?
Or will we learn to do different? And if we did, what would it take?
Well, I think we would have to change one of our most basic paradigms. To learn NOT to always, always be on the precipice.
What would that take? I really don't know, but I think it would be a major shift of outlook.
In thinking about this concept... more than enough for everyone... what if there was more than enough education? More than enough ideas? More than enough time? What if we DIDN'T have to parse out every single friggin' morsel of resource, to eye each and every action for it's "return on investment"?
It contravenes every single impulse that I have of how things "should" work. Maximal efficiency, "hurry sickness", extreme focus. When something is that ingrained in me, I think it is probably very ingrained in others. So ingrained, we don't even see that it's there.
But I see that there is a new way of thinking and of feeling.
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Well, this is something I've been thinking about for literally years. All animals breed to the limits of their resources. Which means in seasons, or years, or environments, of fewer resources, all animals live on the edge of starvation at some time. That includes early humans. When humans discovered their first technology - the baby sling? the bowl? the pounding rock? - they had a chance to get ahead of their marginal existence if they did two things - only have replacement children, and only take enough for immediate existence and for future food/ water/ shelter security. Don't be the chimp on the pile of fruit b/c you can't eat it all, and the social structure that allows it destroys your long-term security. But if everyone takes just enough, there will always be enough for all, immediately and in the future. Everyone COULD live a life of security and comfort if humanity learned the lesson technology had to teach us - we are no longer at the imminent mercy of 'not enough'. We don't need to act AS IF our existence is under threat - it no longer is.
And each expansion of technology was a chance to learn that lesson all over again.
But we haven't learned it yet.
So I wonder why. Why do we prostrate ourselves to a system and submit to its yoke around our necks when there is absolutely no need for it?
And I've come up with a few possible answers, but I'm not able to reach a conclusion I am confident in.
One possible answer is evolution ... in the short-term it rewards that which garners the most resources the fastest - with high rates of population growth and expanding territory. That may be the efficiency you refer to. They're efficient consumers of energy.
OTOH it punishes the unsustainable in the long term. When you look at a biome, or ecology, the most sustainable is the one with the most overlapping of functions between species. So there are multiple insects that eat leaves, multiple insects that eat honey, multiple insects that eat carrion etc. And there are multiple insect eaters with overlapping types of insects that they consume. There are grazers of fresh grass, browsers of dried grass, nibblers of roots, consumers of brush and tree leaves ... and various predators of those grazers, browsers, nibblers and consumers, depending on relative size, and speed or other defenses. This is the antithesis of efficiency. While it's most efficient to have one key species of each type, the loss of a key species spells the death of that system. Multiple overlapping functions means the systemic interaction remains stable if one species is lost.
So we may just be at the exponential growth phase and haven't hit the pruning stage of instability.
Another is that as a species we may be built for hierarchies. To have people who have power over your life, or to be a person who has power over other people, may be a normal human state. Uneven resource distribution doesn't strike us as abnormal b/c we're to some extent built for it.
Another is the 'free engery' approach to living systems. If free energy is available, some living thing will find a way to exploit it. Or in social terms, when technology creates excess resources, groups arise that parasitize it. So you get layers of priests, rulers, military, capitalists who find a way to exploit the resources created by technology.
Anyway, my thinking on this is still a work in progress.
Is this along the lines you were thinking?
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Yes, but I think I was approaching it from a different direction, and the idea is so far-reaching and has so many implications that it's impossible to see the whole thing.
I just had several paradigms collide. The paradigm that conservation will save us. The paradigm that efficiency will save us. The paradigm that new technology will save us.
But none of that is true. We can conserve to the point where we're living on a very primitive level and STILL be living on a knife's edge, albeit at a lower standard of living. Heck, we did THAT for hundreds of thousands of years! We can squeeze every last amp-hour and calorie and work-hour out of our resources and our people and divide them up efficiently and STILL be living like shit in some meager, insecure world. We can dream up the greatest technology in the world, but if all we do is strip-mine our planet or use it to make more and more useless toys, what will our future look like?
If we think that we will ensure our future and be more personally secure by applying the approaches that we've always relied on in the past, it's not going to work. It's just not, and if anyone can show me how we can get from "here" to "there" by increased efficiency, more technology, and conservation... well, I sure would like to see it.
Technology, efficiency, centralization, science worked for us in the past to enhance surivial and security, but they're not going to work for us in the future because our limits are no longer technological. Our limits are being imposed by the world. We are living in a new era.
A word on efficiency- efficiency is like a god to us. Even those of us who aren't overtly pro-capitalist can hardly think a bad thing about efficiency. After all, isn't using resources less wastefully a good thing?
But efficiency is a very narrow measure. It only measures how much of "X" you get out for how much of "Y" and "Z" that you put in. So you can measure the efficiency of a car engine, for example, but fail to question the wisdom of creating a society where everyone has to drive everywhere. "The commons" and even the people needed to propel a system forward are almost never counted... they are used up without regard.
The other problem with "efficiency" is that it is the prime driver of centralization (by economies of scale) and centralization is very fragile and prone to all kinds of shocks. In many ways, "efficiency" is a seriously problematic concept. Seed banks, for example, are a very vulnerable "solution" to monoculture. The real answer is diversity.
Two things in our favor: (1) We have reliable, practical birth control that doesn't rely on infanticide. (2) We have big brains. We have to learn to use them.
What it takes, really, more than anything else, is a complete change of focus. Instead of thinking (like good capitalists) that our economy ALWAYS has to "grow" (Say, how CAN one keep growing in a finite world?), that we HAVE to squeeze every last drop of juice out of every single person, that we have to go back to living in caves ... I think that we really need to start thinking about how to live for the foreseeable future... a future that will be fraught with volcanoes and climate shift and earthquakes and all kinds of natural disasters that will make life tough if we don't learn to set surplus aside, and share across the planet.
So, here I am, at the point that you already got to, Kiki. More than anything, if we're going to survive, we're going to have to set aside the algorithms that are running in our heads and directing our feelings, and replace them with something truly new: a plan for the future. A REAL plan, not just a combination of hope and denial and panic and control by TPTB.
For example, we are well past the point where increased automation is improving our lives. People like to work, it's in our genes, it gives us a sense of control. What&
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"It's just not, and if anyone can show me how we can get from "here" to "there" by increased efficiency, more technology, and conservation... well, I sure would like to see it."
I don't find efficiency in itself to be a bad thing. After all, why do things in a way that wastes time, energy and resources when you could be doing them with less waste? Being old, and in pain, sick, and out of steam, I tend to meter my output, looking for easy and ecologically thrifty ways to do things (at a certain point ease and thrift collide, mostly I still choose thrift. That may change.) I > personally < still find a lot of value in conserving both myself and external resources.
I thought there were two important factors to human sustainability: 1) husbanding resources by realizing the mental state that demands MORE is a response to living on the edge, and that due to technology we no longer live in that state, and 2) having only replacement children. In sum, the mental state is one of mutual social recognition that 'just enough' will ensure ease and freedom from want for everyone, not just in the present but indefinitely into the future (as far as is humanly possible).
I think it's the same ethic UK LeGuin wrote about in her book 'The Dispossessed'.
But I find your path to the same end enlightening, b/c it looks back to the beginning, and forward to the logical endpoint of efficiency. What is its function in the world? What is its conclusion? What is its value?
You've given me a lot to consider.
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Hey you guys,
I think you may be kinda blinded by the current paradigm. Some (a lot of) humans have learned the lesson, did learn it and applied it for centuries--on this continent, for instance. It's primarily white Europeans who have taken over the entire world with their knife-edge lunacy. Even where white Europeans do not hold sway, their paradigms have choked out the indigenous cultures like kudzu choking the native grasses.
What's needed, what's always been needed, is gratitude to the planet itself for our existence. Cultures which have held gratitude to the Earth at the center of their spiritualities flourished for millennia before the knife-edge paradigm told them to over-hunt, over-fish and deplete the soil. Many Native American cultures understood and practiced stewardship of the natural world for centuries before the Europeans mucked things up.
Y'know, the vast, and I mean VAST, majority of modern Europeanized people in any population of modern Europeanized people do not create art. Do not have time to create art. That's a sickness. Capitalism degrades art into advertizing and propaganda. Removes "artist" from the list of serious vocations. And whole populations of modern Europeanized people look down on art as some kind of elitist sham.
Aboriginal cultures are full to bursting with art. It's everywhere. If they were living on your knife-edge, as you suggest, from the beginning of time, how could they have made all that art? And good god, why, when life is such an all-consuming struggle? But they did and do. And what fundamental healing purpose does all this art everywhere fulfill? Gratitude to the planet.
This is my single gripe with atheism: where's the gratitude? The Earth, our mother, feeds and clothes us and every spring lavishes us with unbelievable beauty. Gratitude would turn this whole world around, because gratitude makes us humble. It makes us want to give back. Gratitude makes us appreciate something larger than our idiot appetites.
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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"It's primarily white Europeans who have taken over the entire world with their knife-edge lunacy."
And part of my question is how that happens. What triggers it? What allows it to spread? If an existing culture is sustainable, and stable for hundreds or thousands of years, what happens to it in the face of knife-edge lunacy? Does it become overwhelmed, or corrupted? How did this lunacy of greed come to dominate so that pretty much the entire human population is under its yoke? And so that the entire planet is now entering an uncertain future because of it.
And what is the tool to convincing people that it's a dead-end and completely unnecessary? (While we have a choice before the planet scratches us off like a dog does a flea.)
It may not be the only system by which people live, but as insane as it is, it's become the dominant one, and there has to be a mechanism by which that happens.
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HK, I hate to burst your bubble, but natives of all kinds (Maoris, north Americans, Easter Islanders) managed to wipe themselves out by knife-edge existance, or wasted critical resources profligately. There are stories of north American native buffalo hunts where whole herds were killed for tongues, humps, fetuses, and marrow, leaving nearly-whole rotting carcasses. THe Anasazi practiced cannibalism and strip-mined their local area of trees and water. And as far as I know, while the NE natives were matriarchal, the Plains natives treated their women like shit.
The only peoples that I know of who have TRULY learned to live within limits were some Polynesian islanders who could quite often literally see the limits of their world, and who would at times send young men off in canoes whenever the population got too high. Mythologizing ancient peoples isn't going to point us in the direction of a solution.
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Quote:Efficiency is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's also not necessarily a good thing either.
I don't find efficiency in itself to be a bad thing. After all, why do things in a way that wastes time, energy and resources when you could be doing them with less waste? Being old, and in pain, sick, and out of steam, I tend to meter my output, looking for easy and ecologically thrifty ways to do things (at a certain point ease and thrift collide, mostly I still choose thrift. That may change.) I > personally < still find a lot of value in conserving both myself and external resources.
Efficiency is always calcuated from a vewpoint- for example, from the factory-owner's POV - who discouns a lot of inputs (the drive time that workers have to make to get to the production floor, the clean air that get dirtied) if the input doesn't appear on his/her balance sheet.
But even if we try to calculate efficiency from a more universal viewpoint (number of calories per person, number of barrels-of-oil equivalents, or what-have-you), using efficiency as the ONLY measure can lead to dangerous/ distorted results. I realized that when I realized that the things I'm advocating... surpluses everywhere ... stored locally, in the pipeline, decentralized-redundant-excess production capacity... are all considered "waste".
In many ways, the single-minded drive towards "efficiency" is the drive that has created our highly centralized, interdependent, and fragile production structure. So we have one plant in Japan that makes the special plastic required by capacitors? It may be very "efficient", but not very durable.
So, I understand that efficiency can be a good thing, but not if it is the ONLY factor being considered.
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Did you know that there was a plant tht grew around the Mediterranean in ancient times which contained a natural birth-control agent? It was so valuable, it made up part of the treasury assets (along with gold and other valuables) and even appeared on the coin of the realm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium Unfortunately, it was made extinct.
Fortunately, we don't have to depend on Silphium.
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