7 Rungs of a Runaway System: How Civilization Descended Into Crisis

Nate Hagens (0:00)

Greetings, everyone. I'm just back from three weeks of traveling. Very grateful to be done back in the Upper Midwest. My favorite time of year. So I started this podcast because I knew a lot of interesting people who had relevant things to say about the world. And back then, way back then, I didn't do Franklies. But as I talked to more people, I learned more when I thought I knew a lot.

And I became more curious. And understanding that humanity from my academic paper and such is functioning like a metabolic superorganism is a much different thing than understanding why and how and what it implies for interventions. So these Franklies have evolved to be by far my favorite part of this work, because it's my creative outlet and keeps my curiosity going. And it's a curiosity loop where I learn from the guests and it makes me dive into topics that I hadn't thought about. To wit, I recently had a frankly on information hazards of the future. And in the comments, one of you left a suggestion that I look into two economists from the 1960s, Buchanan and Tullock, which I did. And what follows is what I put together after that research, which really merges with all the other content on this channel and the implications. The information deficit model that all we need is better info communicated to the public is clearly wrong, or at least insufficient. We've had better and better science about energy, ecological issues for 50 years, and emissions have more than doubled, material consumption has tripled. Couple that with recent guest Greg Elliott's observation that if our economic system were a human being, it would share many traits with a psychopath. And the result is a global economic superorganism with a seemingly unstoppable energy metabolism and hunger for more stuff. And I've recently, if you haven't noticed, been a bit obsessed with understanding how all that happens. And I think I've come up with a political science informed behavioral ladder that I think makes sense in explaining it.

Okay, there are six rungs on this ladder, which I'll explain one at a time. But here's an overview. At the top is worldview. Below that, values and status signals, then rules and institutions, then incentives, then information, and at the very bottom, events and behavior, the stuff on the Daily News. So on the sides of this ladder are also two arrows. The leverage for change rises as you climb this ladder, in the spirit of Danella Meadows and her leverage points work. And the speed of change increases as you go down the ladder. And everything visible in our day-to-day lives happens on that bottom rung. We think that we're deciding and acting here, but our decisions all link to what's happened on the rungs above it. Okay, and to keep this getting from too nerdy and abstract, I'm going to apply all these rungs to a simple real-life example of an item within our system, a gallon of gasoline. Okay, the top rung is World View. These are the stories that generate everything below them, but we hold them so deeply that they don't feel like stories. Things like humans are separate and above nature.

More is better. Growth is the normal state of the world. What I call energy blindness lives on this rung. We treat energy as one commodity among many, just a line item in our current culture, rather than the thing that actually makes every other line item possible.

World Views are invisible to the people who hold them, which is why they are so hard to change. Most people do not experience their world view as a personal choice that they made. Now, individuals can change their world views, and most people, I think, experience some change over their lives, usually shaped by the individuals around them, or the podcasts they follow, more than any academic arguments and data. But our cultural world view, the focus of this rung, is shaped by the inertia of the majority world view of a generation ago. And it changes typically very slowly. Only when we see a major system level shock, like a global depression or a world war or such, do we see sudden and sweeping change. So our gallon of gasoline at this rung, one gallon does roughly five weeks of hard physical human labor. And the dominant world view prices it and therefore values it equivalent to a gallon of milk. Simple to produce, simple to replace. So this is the energy blindness world view in a single price comparison. Okay, below that, one rung down are values and status signals. Humans are social species and effectively copying machines. We imitative what we witness others admiring, which is how world views get strengthened and enforced without anyone acting as an enforcer. And today, our cultural scoreboard tracks consumption and display and flexing and bling and things like square footage and follower counts and brand name clothes and the new flashy boat and the exotic vacation.