(2015-03-02) Hall Situational Assessment 2015

Jordan Hall: Situational Assessment 2015 So, what are some of the important challenges (Grand Challenge) of our contemporary situation?

I. The Global Financial System

it is an utter mess that has been waiting to pop now for a decade.

II. The Global Political System

three specific challenges

The end of the American Hegemony. Say what you like about Pax Americana, the historical periods where one world power holds effective hegemony are characterized by relative stability.

The rise and threat of the “empowered individual.” John Robb has explored this challenge in detail

the rise of the hyper-surveillance / hyper-control state here

I’d say that the political system is much less stressed than the financial system, but there are plenty of cracks and it is more subject to acute human emotion. One thing that I look for is a political intervention in a financial crisis (say in Greece right now) that kicks off an inflammation into the political realm

III. All of our “Civilization Toolkit

Both I and II are, in my assessment, specific examples of a more broad challenge: the total set of our social institutions are well past due. More importantly, the total set of the tools and concepts that we use to think about, assess and construct social institutions are well past due. My thinking here is derived from Carrol Quigley’s Evolution of Civilizations and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies.

we find we are in real trouble because we are married to our tools. We not only use them, we think with them. The only way we can figure out how to solve a problem is to use some tool from our “civilization toolkit”.

I call this “hypertrophication.”

A simple example is the response to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Credit Crisis 2008). Rather than acknowledging that our entire approach to regulation (and, indeed to finance itself) is what is broken and needs to be thoroughly reinvented, we recoil from the magnitude of that level of consideration and, instead, try to solve the problem with “more of the same”.

So, when that toolkit itself is losing its edge, do we take the risk of leaving “what we know” or double down? Usually, almost always, the latter.

if not all of our problems are a result of these powerful, delusional and hypertrophied tools.

a) A huge amount of our social energy is tied up in these increasingly destructive institutions. e.g., Consider how much human capital is being wasted in our education system

b) A huge amount of power is vested in these institutions and, in particular, in the elites who control them, who therefore have short term interests that are divergent from the rest of humanity

c) The “cognitive monopoly” on ideas held by the old civilization toolkit inhibits the discovery and implementation of actually good ideas at the individual, group and social levels (BigWorld)

d) The resulting apathy, “false hopelessness,” or violent reaction that results when we can’t think our way out of our distress

Consider the downside consequences of our dysfunctional economic/financial/political institutions various “responses” to the financial crisis. They make the crisis worse, reduce faith in political institutions and drive more people into “apathy” or “violence”. If the rubicon is crossed, we can easily see a financial crisis cascade into a social revolution.

IV. Ecosystem Disruption

Toxificiation of the atmosphere, water and soil. Species extinction (particularly in the oceans). Deforestation. Water supply depletion.

Climate change gets the headlines

But climate change isn’t the only challenge here. As we move to address climate change and its underlying causes, we will find our menu of ecosystem-related maladies constantly multiplying over the next several decades.

V. Accelerating Pace of Technology

The singularity. Yep, its on the board as well. What used to be consigned to a small group of “crazy people” is increasingly being taken quite seriously by anyone who looks closely

By my lights, this is the key driver

Consistently over the next set of decades, the exponential growth of technology is going to disrupt existing institutions.

their response to being disrupted can be a total mess

Exponential technology growth is the poison and cure to ecosystem disruption. For example, we already have geoengineering power (e.g., ocean iron fertilization or cloud seeding), and this power is only going to increase. But do we have the wisdom?

Exponential technology growth is going to make the coevolutionary struggle between the empowered individual and the hyper-surveillance state an existential threat.

We are there. From somewhere around the beginning of WWI, the major structures Western Civilization innovated after the Enlightenment started to collapse. After WWII, we engineered a deep retrofit with a whole set of new technologies (the welfare state, operational planning, mass production, scientific engineering, etc.) and this worked. Wonderfully. Population exploded, lifestyle transformed. We went to the moon.

Our late 20th Century innovations managed to carry us through to somewhere in the late 70's or early 80's. At this point we again started to see the edges of our “civilization toolkit” giving away and we made a fateful choice: stability in exchange for adaptive fitness. We doubled down

The Bottom Line

my sense is the interconnections between I — V give us three or four decades (five at the outside) to get our shit straight. Otherwise, we will fall off of the high wire and the way down is pretty deep.

My estimate of three to four decades assumes that we do a pretty darn good job facing our challenges. In other words, it requires neither extraordinary genius or venality

But if we want to last more than four decades, we are going to have to do much better. We are going to have to face reality and Reinvent Everything.