Dematerialism
Degrowth, Decentralization, Demarchy, Delegislation, Deschooling,
and Dechrematisticalism
The prevention of competition for wealth and power is a
necessary and sufficient condition for Universal Sustainable Happiness. Any method whatever for achieving this is dematerialism. Any society in which it is possible
for one person to compete for greater material wealth or a greater share in
posterity than others is doomed.
Can
Resource Dominance Be Eliminated?
The
Defects of Capitalism: My List
Social
Media, Music, and Model Railroading
Our
crisis has a physical component and an imaginary component. The physical
component comes from limitations in the quantities of land, water, consumable
energy, and the environment itself. The ecological footprint of the human race
exceeds the carrying capacity of Earth. The imaginary component is instability
in the monetary system caused by excessive debt and excessive monetary
inequality. To ameliorate the physical crisis we must eliminate the imaginary
one. I do not mean that indebtedness, poverty, and wealth are imaginary; but,
rather, that we can eliminate all three with the application of our
imaginations without affecting the physical universe. Stabilizing our
population and reducing our ecological footprint will ultimately have a
desirable effect upon the universe.
Regardless
of what the people want, the owners of the country want to retain their
positions of power, privilege, and wealth. Naturally, they despise the idea of
government control of the economy and the means of production; however, when a
crisis arises that they cannot handle, they readily accede to crisis socialism
to save them. During World War II, without adopting socialism completely, they
allowed rationing, wage and price control, and management of vital industries
by government employees (albeit members of the traditional ruling class) even
if they were paid only one dollar per year.
To
respond appropriately to resource and environmental limits, we need to
establish crisis socialism. However, to eliminate debt, we need to repudiate
the US dollar; and, to eliminate inequality, we need to pay everyone the same
even if no work can be found for them to replace the inessential work from
which they were furloughed to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and our
ecological footprint. After all, the requirement that every citizen does useful
work to get paid and the requirement that the pay should be commensurate with
the value of the work are completely imaginary. The idea that everyone should
be allowed to get as much money as he can is completely wrong.
But
crisis socialism is a long way from Dematerialism. .For
example, most of us still think about money as the reward for contributing
something useful to our community. The amount of money we acquire is the score
in the game of life. Instead, we should think of money as a way to
measure our consumption of scarce natural capital, which we can do once again
with a rational monetary system based upon physical quantities
which we now have scientific ways to measure rather than letting markets set
prices. Belief in the “invisible hand” of the market is now quite generally
recognized as belief in magic and, as such, no better than belief in astrology.
We shall show that there is no way to justify anything but equality in
consumption.
Dematerialism refers to any political economy in which, due to the
structure and arrangement of the institutions, it is not possible for any
member of the community to acquire more wealth or material resources than
another. Resource dominance hierarchies cannot arise. In fact, the individual's
share in the net production of the community is not in play. The term may be
applied to the belief in or dedication to such a political economy. The
principal justification for this work is that it corrects the problems with
Marxism that have contributed to previous attempts to replace Capitalism,
which, as we shall see, is intrinsically unsustainable.
Direct
Aristotelian democracy is the basis for the so-called Fractal Government
proposed here so as to ensure that all political power is retained by the
people. Since every citizen must be a member of a community council which
determines public policy, the village or neighborhood, the basic political
molecule, must be small enough to3 be effective. Thus decentralization must be the
ultimate goal regardless of how the present system has to be accommodated. In
particular, the largest identifiable political unit should be the drainage
region, i. e., the contiguous portion of the land
that drains into common reservoirs without any of the neighboring areas
draining into it. This is the fundamental unit of land in ecology. (Professor
Jorge Gabitto, formerly the chairman of the
department of chemical engineering at Prairie View University, pointed out that
our maps are drawn in the most regrettable manner from the viewpoint of
ecology. Rivers make convenient borders for map makers but not for ecologists.)
The space between the basic molecules and the governing body of the entire
ecological region is the fractal-like structure shown in Figure 2. Additional
necessities for decentralization are well known.
Figure 1. Fractal
Figure 2. Fractal Political Structure
Demarchy is our name for a political economy in which distinguished
members of the government such as political representatives are chosen by sortition, the semi-random method we normally employ in
selecting jurors.
Our
vast systems of law are ridiculous. Laws should be replaced by a few simple
moral axioms from which right action can be derived easily. We should embrace
rational morals that anyone can follow as opposed to religious superstitions
and sexual and pharmacological prudery that no person of spirit can live by.
Dissent should be tolerated and even those who do not accept our rational
morality should be accorded the dignity of sovereign heads of state.
Our
system of morals should be derived from a complete, self-consistent, mutually
independent set of first principles that can be explained to a six-year-old and
upon which most educated people can agree. If, in addition, those who dissent –
even after we have employed our most compelling logical testimony – can be
accommodated without coercion and without inconvenience to themselves
or us, we shall have done very well indeed. – On the Preservation of Species
Laws
and morals should be congruent. Behavior that the community finds immoral, can be legal only in an incomplete legal system;
whereas, a legal system that prohibits moral acts is tyrannous. Both laws and
morals are obtained for the convenience of the community, provided the
requirements of sustainability are met. There are certain aesthetic and other
intuitive principles that we hope will come into play. I shall attempt to
justify my otherwise arbitrary choices in the section on axiomatic morality
below.
It
makes sense to enter into the record at this point Professor Al Bartlett's
famous talk, which explains how man's ignorance of the exponential function has
affected our present population crisis: https://eroei.net/bartlettexp.mp4
As
Prof. Bartlett puts it:
Can
you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from
microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way
aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally,
nationally, or globally? - A.A. Bartlett, January 8, 1996
I
can think of no better tribute to Al Bartlett than to emulate his
challenge: Can you think of any social problem on any scale that is not
exacerbated by the institution of private profit? In particular, I claim that
population increase is worsened by the institution of private profit. The
problem of over-population will not be solved except by Die-Off in a society
that permits private profit.
If
I may be permitted to widen the meaning of the term private profit to include (i) the increase of the proportion in the population of ones
race, religion, politics, culture, or point of view and (ii) the increase in ones
own or ones employer's, relative's, colleague's, or ally's accumulation or
share of material wealth, then my challenge to the world is to name a single
problem of humanity that is not exacerbated by private profit. It is the
term "material" in "material wealth" that supplies the term
"material" in the word "dematerialism".
Here are .wmv and .mp4 versions of Albert Bartlett's
famous talk on the exponential function as it applies to population:
http://eroei.net/bartlettexp.mp4
http://eroei.net/bartlettexp.wmv
It
takes about 10 kilocalories of primary energy to supply one kilocalorie in our
diets. Just now, we have enough conventional and fracked
oil to support an agriculture sector that can support a large over-population;
however, there are compelling reasons to abandon fossil fuel chief among which
are the alarmingly high probability of catastrophic climate change and the
absolute certainty that the supply of fossil fuel is finite and eventually will
cost more energy to harvest than it will return. Perhaps it is not too soon to
state a fundamental principle of social planning and forecasting, namely, that
any event in the future of society that should be expected soon because of the
nature of the exponential function should be treated as though it will occur
tomorrow.
I tried very hard to prove that capitalism requires
economic growth and ended up with nothing better than a reasonable plausibility argument. David Delaney, however, provided a
completely satisfying explanation in “The Economic Growth
Trap” which became the first step in the physical argument for Dematerialism.
“The Economic Growth Trap” by (the late) David Delaney. Today
(01.23.06) I read “What to do in a failing civilization” by David M. Delaney. It contained the best
explanation of why American-style capitalism requires growth I have ever
seen. With the kind permission of the author, it is reprinted
below. David posted the full paper and his other essays at http://geocities.com/davidmdelaney/.
David
Delaney died a few years back; and, I no longer know where to find his
excellent work. Someone should do whatever it takes to find this storehouse of
well-considered thought.
Economic
growth requires increasing the amount of high quality energy and materials
degraded by the economy each year. Economic growth on a finite planet
will eventually stop. If it does not exhaust the resources needed for its
continuation, it will stop earlier for some other reason. Allowing
resource depletion and biosphere degradation to terminate economic growth will
produce catastrophe. Unfortunately, our dependence on economic growth
makes it extremely unlikely that we will give it up voluntarily before the
catastrophe. Our dependence has at least four aspects: A) in the need to
deal with adverse consequences of labor-reducing innovations, B) in commercial
bank money, C) in the need to maintain tolerance of inequality, and D) in
financial markets.
A)
The first dependence on economic growth is in the need to avoid the adverse
consequences of innovations that reduce the need for labor.1 By
definition, each labor-reducing innovation either increases the amount of a
good produced or throws some people out of work. Firms that create or
exploit a labor-reducing innovation create new jobs internally by driving other
firms out of business. The new jobs implementing the innovation offset
the loss of jobs caused by the innovation, but the innovating firms don’t
necessarily hire all of the job losers, because the innovation reduced the
total amount of labor needed to produce the original amount of the good.
In order to re-employ all job losers, the economy must grow to produce more of
the good with all of the original workers, or produce more of some other good
with the cheaper labor (the job losers) now available. In either case the
economy grows. Much of what we consider progress is due to labor-reducing
innovations. In order to live without economic growth, we would have to
give up this kind of progress, or introduce arrangements to allow workers who
become unproductive to retain their relative wealth and self-respect, or
relegate most people to a repressed underclass. There is a powerful
incentive to avoid these contingencies by encouraging economic growth.
B)
The second dependence on economic growth is in the creation of money by the act
of borrowing at interest from commercial banks. Much of the money in each
loan by a commercial bank is created by the loan itself. The bank
collects a fee—the interest—for providing the service of creating the
money. Other ways of creating money have been explored in theory and
practice. Successful local currencies have been based on some of these
alternatives, (see Douthwaite, Short Circuit, page
61) but all national money is now created by interest-bearing loans from
commercial banks. This way of creating money contributes instability to
an economy based on it. In order to keep the money supply from
contracting when a loan and its interest are paid, a larger total of new loans
must be created, increasing the money supply. (This is not transparently
obvious. For a more detailed explanation, see Douthwaite,
The Ecology of Money, page 24.) When the economy grows to match the
increasing money supply, the value of money is relatively stable, and
commercial-bank-created money is benign. If the rate of economic growth
does not match the rate of growth of the money supply, the money supply becomes
unstable. Given the use of money created by interest-bearing loans from
commercial banks, an economy can minimize the resulting instabilities of the
money supply by sustaining moderate growth. Monetary instability would
put significant hazards in the way of deliberate attempts to contract our
economy unless the creation of money was radically reformed.
C)
The third dependence on economic growth is in the political and geopolitical
need for tolerance of inequality. Differences of wealth are at least as
great within the developed countries as they are between developed and developing
countries. Think of the ratio of the average income of American CEOs to
the average salary of workers in their companies. Domestically and
internationally, the tolerance of the poor and middle classes for the existence
of wealthier classes and countries depends on a belief in economic
growth. The poor struggle, while seeing that others are wealthy and still
others are grotesquely wealthy. The poor are told a story: if they
keep to their work and to their diversions, and tolerate the rich, they will be
better off in the future than they are today. They believe this story, or
at least don’t revolt against it, because it is supported by propaganda and
shared myths, and has been true for many. When economic growth disappears
forever, the poor, like everyone else, will recognize that they will be
progressively worse off, with no future relief possible. The peaceful
tolerance by the poor and the middles for the rich will disappear. A
peaceful end of economic growth would require redistribution of wealth, with
consequent political and geopolitical contention. Desire to avoid the
contention makes it unlikely that deliberate elimination of economic growth
will be attempted before economic growth is ended by nature. The
intolerance of differences of wealth that will then appear will itself not be
tolerated by the rich, causing additional domestic and international conflict
just at the advent of other adverse changes. At that time, if not before,
tyrannical repression of the poor will greatly tempt the rich.
D)
The fourth dependence on economic growth is in the financial markets—the
mechanism of capitalization of public corporations. Public corporations,
the main actors in industrial economies, depend on financial markets not only
for capital for innovation, but for discipline, valuation, motivation, and a
major part of their rationale for existence. Owners of
capital—investors—give the use of it over to public corporations by buying
equity or debt in financial markets. They do so only because they expect
that they will, on average, and over the long term, receive back more than they
gave up. That expectation disappears when most investors understand there
will be no economic growth. Most of the apparent wealth of the world
consists of equity and debt bought and sold in financial markets. Any
realistic possibility of the end of growth would fill investors with something
like terror. Political initiatives to bring an end to growth will be
opposed by investors with every means at their command. The controversial
nature of proposals that would reduce or eliminate economic growth will likely
prevent the proposals from reaching even the status of political
contention. When the onset of sustained economic contraction is generally
perceived, investors will withdraw from financial markets. The resulting
failure of the markets will make many necessary developments impossible to
finance and will produce confusion and stasis in public corporations just when
we need them to adapt to new circumstances.
[end of Economic Growth Trap]
We
may assume that, after all reasonably anticipated energy conservation
technology has been developed and installed, economic growth must be
accompanied by growth in energy consumption, which must result in the rapid
onset of Peak Oil in the sense of Hubbert and,
subsequently - if permitted, exponential growth in the number of nuclear
installations. We must assume that, without fusion, some sort of breeder
reactor will replace fission. Even if we neglect global warming and the China Syndrome, we must give up NIMBY, since continued economic
growth will place nuclear plants in our backyards.
It may take only a few minutes to read the hyperlinked material; but, it took
weeks to write it after reading the University of Chicago's and MIT's reports
on the future of nuclear. See The Nuclear Option https://dematerialism.net/NuxlearOption.html from
“On the
Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario”:
In
other words, suppose we can visualize a world in which economic growth is
tolerated into the indefinite future. After every reasonable conservation
measure has been taken by a non-increasing population, every new quantum of
economic growth will result in a corresponding increase in our total
consumption of emergy – not by a constant factor regardless of other
considerations, but by some factor, φ, greater than 1.0. (Actually, φ
> 1 + ϵ, where ϵ is a constant greater than zero; i. e., φ is not constant, but
ϵ is.) Thus, continued economic growth must be met with a corresponding
greater capacity to produce energy. Given the limitations on fossil fuel
production, we must choose an energy production technology capable of
sustaining perpetual growth. This is impossible as amply demonstrated in the
case of nuclear energy, which might be the best choice for the attempt. See “The Nuclear Option”,
taken from “On
the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario”, where the finite size
of the Earth is the limitation. Although we know of no exception to this rule,
we would still like to have a mathematical proof.
When I embarked upon this project, it seemed obvious that
we would have to abandon fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy, provided
renewable energy technologies with EroEI* (“ER over
EI star”) no less than 1.0 could be found or developed. One had the scientific
consensus regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming, which had no more than a 49%
(for the sake of argument) chance of being wrong, if we neglect predictions as
to just when certain temperature signposts would be reached. We may assume that
such signposts that the theory predicts will be reached eventually should be
treated as though they required immediate action, just as we assume every gun is
loaded. In addition, we had the finite supply of oil, the consumption of which
was increasing exponentially, which according to similar reasoning, should be
viewed as essentially unavailable.
One wonders, then, if the maximum possible energy production from renewable
energy equals or exceeds the total energy budget for the entire nation.
Incidentally, I found it necessary to validate the technique whereby the energy
cost of a high-dollar project well-distributed over the sectors of the economy
was found by multiplying the E/GDP ratio by the gross cash investment for the
project under consideration. This assumption was corroborated by the analysis
of “Energy in a Mark-II-Economy”. Finally, “Energy in a Natural Economy” uses
Bureau of Economic Analysis data to determine how much useful work will need to
be performed per unit of time after we power down to the Earth as a Garden.
Finally, the paper “On
the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario” indicates that
renewable energy technology is inadequate to support American-style Capitalism.
However, examples of sustainable political economies are given.
What
is to be done with that section of the possessors of specific talents whose
talent is for moneymaking? History and daily experience teach us that if the
world does not devise some plan of ruling them, they will rule the world. Now
it is not desirable that they should rule the world; for the secret of
moneymaking is to care for nothing else and to work at nothing else; and as the
world’s welfare depends on operations by which no individual can make money,
whilst its ruin ... is enormously profitable to moneymakers, the supremacy of
the moneymaker is the destruction of the State. A society which depends on the
incentive of private profit is doomed.– George Bernard
Shaw, The Millionairess.
Chrematistics
Here
is a case in which we can do no better than to quote the Wikipedia, which is
permissible under the applicable rules:
“Aristotle established
a difference between economics and chrematistics that would be foundational in
medieval thought. For Aristotle, the accumulation of
money itself is an unnatural activity that dehumanizes those who practice
it. Trade
Exchanges, money for goods, and usury create
money from money, but do not produce useful goods. Hence, Aristotle, like Plato, condemns
these actions from the standpoint of their philosophical ethics. [snip]”
Thus,
activities that are performed to obtain a greater share of the net proceeds of
the economy for the worker or his employer but produce nothing that we need to
live and enjoy life can be distinguished from genuine economic activity by the
term “chrematistics”. Inasmuch as this constitutes a huge overhead on the
economy that we can no longer afford as we approach Peak Oil, we take the
liberty of referring to the elimination of chrematistics as dechrematisticalism,
partly for the pleasure of coining a beautiful large word but mostly because it
will postpone the extinction of the human race for an astronomical period of
time. This analysis was verified in “Energy in a Natural Economy”.
Notice that I had a good notion of the split between economics, in the sense of
Aristotle, and chrematistics, even though I did not know the word. Notice, as
well, that the sort of people who would own the world, as in the game of
monopoly, which likewise is played in a world that cannot grow, would be
stripped of their peculiar power; and, the introduction of a new monetary
system (acually a system of rationing consumption)
would prevent the sort of inequalities that precede violent revolutions.
Can Resource Dominance Be Eliminated?
It
will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite impractical,
and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is
impractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth
carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical
scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in
existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But
it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that
could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will
be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one
really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one
quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely
on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. —
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Let
us set aside, for a moment, the possibility of a benevolent deity the existence
of whom would assure any reasonable person that resource dominance has no
permanent place in human nature (theism); or, what amounts to the same thing,
that the true nature of Man is inherently noble (humanism), so that resource
dominance is merely an example of a temporary corrupting influence that will
soon be corrected. We are left with little more than the choice between
Transcendental Idealism represented by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
mechanics and Transcendental Realism represented by the global-hidden-variables
interpretation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen gedankenexperiment as actualized by the experiments of
Alain Aspect and his co-workers. In case of theism, humanism, or
Transcendental Idealism, resource dominance can be eliminated from human
behavior by eliminating the corrupting influence, namely, materialism, or by
the timely intervention of good fortune.
In
the case of Transcendental Realism, we may retain hope for Dematerialism
in all but the last of the following cases:
1.
Resource dominance is not an intrinsic characteristic of human nature.
2.
Resource dominance is an intrinsic characteristic of human nature; however, it
can be subverted by re-directing it toward more realistic ways to achieve
reproductive advantage (i) by manifesting excellence
in all of our activities so as to earn the admiration of members of both
genders or (ii) by manifesting greater sex appeal than other candidates for the
affections of members of the opposite sex. This redirection can be
achieved by education, indoctrination, legislation, or any combination of
these.
3.
Our knowledge of human nature is insufficient to make a judgment either way.
4.
Finally, it is possible that resource dominance is an intrinsic characteristic
of human nature that cannot be subverted – even by law backed by certain and
severe punishment, in which case Dematerialism is
impossible.
Deschooling
For
this important subject, which, perhaps, is the sine-qua-non of the trip to dematerialism for the majority of people, I shall have to
rely principally on the work of others, as I have done practically nothing
myself except to add five points to John Gatto's
famous list and to say what must be said in the argument for the legalization
of drugs.
Why K–12 Education Does More Harm than Good
Graduate education in engineering and science
Character Education, Anti-Drug Propaganda, and Religion
The Scapegoating of Drugs and
Mass Hysteria
John Gatto’s Seven-Lesson School
Teacher
The Role of Materialism in the Mis-education
of Youth
https://www.dematerialism.net/indexpart2.pdf