Common Ground, a dialogue
Why we are having a conversation? I would like to think: to define our common ground and understand how we can get there far more effectively.
So let’s start with who we are.
Hardware: our DNA is set in a physical and biological environment.
We are breathing, eating, reproducing and, in the end dying, biological organisms living on a planet. All trying to make the very best of it. Ian McHarg* calls this “Creative Fitting”. Which, if done well, results in health. *Ian McHarg’s Dwelling in Nature
- https://soundcloud.com/vanhoesenj/creativefitting
- Text of his lecture https://issuu.com/papress/docs/ian-mcharg
Software: the strategy we use to achieve this.
A spider, hatched from its egg, sets alone out to carve a place in the world. 1% succeed, only to interact with its sort to fight off competition or to mate. Works for them. But we humans, as Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel and Yuval Noah Harari in his re-hash explain, maintain far more complex strategies.
All cultures, ideologies and religions are merely expressions of these various forms we humans apply to try to achieve this “creative fitting, liberating us from the slowness of genetic evolution. Constructs like reciprocity, morality, authenticity, freedom and tools like money and language are more or less helpful on this road we call life.
But it’s important to keep reminding ourselves that they are merely mental models. STORIES, not laws of physics, which strive for optimal allocation of resources with the promise of a “good life”. To succeed, most of these strategies must strive for dominance within their societies and beyond. Post-modern thinkers have helped us to uncover the underlying mechanisms we use to achieve this.
These complex social systems require high throughputs of energy and materials to maintain their organisational complexity*. At some point, they inevitably reach the end of their systemic validity (point of diminishing returns) and collapse. Re-opening the path to find new perspectives. These transitions are tough times. It took 2 World Wars to finally terminate the hegemony of the aristocracy in Europe.
- Tainter & Patzek, The Energy–Complexity Spiral https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-7677-2_5
- The Collapse Of Complex Societies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsT9V3WQiNA&list=LLPkL-LnXBastRngFGorWQUw&index=8
I believe we are currently in a struggle between two competing World Views to replace the past eras of dirty industrialisation and post-imperialism. One is Hyper Capitalism leading to high levels of concentration of capital-intensive resources: people in high-density cities, urban industrial vertical farming (no-soil), energy from billion euro nuclear reactors, the concentration of power led by corporate interests and higher thresholds of regulations to discourage competition. The other model is Dispersed with a much lower carbon footprint. Centred around network communities and commons led. With low/medium density living integrated with local smart, solar-based energy production, regenerative agroforestry (living surrounded by green) and (in part) local production facilities ranging from medicine to bio-based products (clothing, building, etc)… But the Global European Anticipation Bulletin, GEAB, warns: ”dreaming of a better world, waking up in a battlefield”
In most discussions I’ve observed, the how is often mistaken for the why. An economy is only a means to an end. In the end, our true goal, integral health, strangely stays out of sight. Mostly out of ignorance, but sometimes by design, to mask power intentions. As the decentralised approach could herald a significant decrease in financial dependency resulting in less servitude and therefore diminishing corporate profits. Similar to what happened in the US during the ’50-’60.
Few realise to what extent their “free will” has been conditioned. In any debate or dialogue, our cultural/societal programming is basically running our hard-ware. Baked-in heuristics are very very very hard to re-route and are vulnerable to exploitation by smart people like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays.
Step 2 in our dialogue is therefore to realise… I am programed in a couleur locale. True dialogue mirrors and helps us understand the extent to which.
The reason I am highly aware of this is that before the age of twelve I grew up on 3 continents, lived in 5 countries and learnt to speak 4 languages. I was never a member of any dominant majority. Hence, unlike most locals, I was often (painfully) aware of the conditionality, thus relativity, of the locally dominant paradigms*. Together with my deprogrammed “loss aversion bias”, killed by multiple relocations, makes it a bit easier for me to challenge thought patterns and discard (de & reprogram) my own if I need to.
*Geert Hofstede Cultural Dimensions/identities https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/
Our process of Creative Fitting is what binds us. Which I function to:
objective = input x action
Objective: health. What I like about this metric is that it rids us of dualism. It includes both the physical and mental component and doesn’t prioritise wealth over wellbeing. You may frame it even bolder: health is the synoptic indicator of human progress.
Health is “the capability of recovery from insult,” and a healthy person is “one who not only solves problems but also seeks them.” Ian McHarg
With complex organisms, something rather fascinating happens. Their health, unlike the spider, not only depends on their autonomous interactions with their physical environment and biochemical nutrients but also on their social interactions. Cooperation has over time become hard-wired into our behavioural genetics. Which are then programmed by our local cultural conditioning and locked into our (culturally informed) identities. This gives the health objective of culturally programmed individuals an interesting, non-physiological, dimension.
Input: (bio)physical and human resources (materials, energy & computational power). Beyond subsistence level to be able to achieve more than just human physical safety and physiological security.
“The energy requirements of a good life are surprisingly low. New research finds that more energy consumption (beyond about 75 gigajoules per person per year for most metrics) no longer contributes to greater well-being.” https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/04/the-energy-requirements-of-a-good-life-are-surprisingly-low/
Actions: run by a system of organisation & governance to achieve an effective allocation and (re)distribution of human and (bio)physical resources.
Everything we do affects either the input and or the actions, thus nearing or distancing ourselves from our health objective.
“One of the limits to our ability to evaluate information objectively is what’s called the Narrative Fallacy. We love stories and we let our preference for a good story cloud the facts and our ability to make rational decisions. This means that we may be drawn towards a less desirable outcome simply because it has a better story.”
Stories people now will follow unthinkingly and with blind vigour. Once these frames are fed into human pre-programmed tendencies for effort-reduction heuristics, also known as cognitive laziness, aka quick-fixes, they become dogmas. Popular culture hungers for simple solutions, palatable sound bites.
“Degrowth” fits that bill. But so do the framings of circular economy, urban densification, democracy and 2 degrees of global temperature rise. These are, at best, incomplete, obscuring our perspective on the scale of the problem or obscuring our view on how to effectively approach them if we want to achieve our objective.
“John Stuart Mill argues that free discourse is a necessary condition for intellectual and social progress. We can never be sure, he contends, that a silenced opinion does not contain some element of the truth. He also argues that allowing people to air false opinions is productive for two reasons. First, individuals are more likely to abandon erroneous beliefs if they are engaged in an open exchange of ideas. Second, by forcing other individuals to re-examine and re-affirm their beliefs in the process of debate, these beliefs are kept from declining into mere dogma.”
Like Stuart Mills, I believe that critical and open dialogue is the only way for a society to evolve. The inverse is true if led by the unabashed censorship invoked by wokeness.
So let's talk about how to collectively reach our integral health objective.
Amsterdam, May 17, 2021
Gerald Lindner
