The Daily: 8 February 2024

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As I was digging through past Februaries, looking for calendar things, I found this. I brushed it off a bit and decided it was good enough for another go — and rather topical for this week. So here is…

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Our future isn’t a problem to be solved…

To begin, we do not face one broken thing, like a clock or a car engine, that can be put back together with our clever hands and big brains. We face many things that are working more or less properly — it’s just that many aspects of that proper functioning are not going our way. Yet even if we chose some of the parts that are the most painful and treated them like individual projects, lots of little problems, there would never be one solution. Probably not even one solution for any given partial problem, never mind one solution for the whole poly-mess. One solution is never a thing, because there is never one thing that needs solving. It’s all connected. I rather think that one solution thinking is the tool of the global elite, those who want to retain control through top-down fixes. One solution thinking is the master’s tool. One solution thinking led us to this point where we are mired in an interconnected mess that is sorting itself out in ways that are problematic to human survival. But all of this is not a problem — it’s just life restoring balance after one part got a little full of itself — and so there is no solution.

Nor is there any fault. No enemies or adversarial forces arrayed against humanity (except perhaps other humans…). If we push a boulder up the hill to an unstable position, eventually it will roll back down. It is not the boulder’s fault if we are standing in its path. It is no fault at all. It is not a problem. Nor is there a solution that includes the boulder. There is only our own response, and this response is as varied as the conditions that led to each individual reaction. Some of us might just step to the side. Some might try (probably with less success) to outrun the rock. Some might flamboyantly jump onto the boulder and run against its spin all the way down the hill. (I suppose that works.) Then there are inevitably some who never pushed the rock and who are not standing in its path (though that last is not totally true of anyone on a single, bounded planet). Or if they did once stand in harm’s way, they are now more or less out of danger somewhere away from the path of greatest destruction.

We’ve done things that have created a situation that will cause a great deal of harm, to ourselves and a great many other beings. We can’t do more of the same things and expect the damages to be lessened. Nor can we undo the things we’ve done. We are here with the boulder perched precariously on the ledge. Indeed, there is solid evidence that it is already toppling. There will be collapse of many systems, but particularly the ones that led to this destructive state. Now, we respond. Each of us in our own best way.

This leaves quite a lot of room for some to continue doing things that cause harm. But the thing is, the harm they are doing is undermining their ability to do that harm. They are consuming what is needed to support their systematic rendering of harm. They are destroying the whole system and setting the boulder tumbling. That rock will assuredly fall on them if they insist on pushing it to where it is unbalanced — and then just stand there like ninnies, prattling on about all the clever ways that they could keep the boulder from falling down….

In any case, the messes we’re embedded in are far more complex than one boulder on a ledge. Or even dozens of boulders. We have set most of our own life support systems spiraling into disaster. We could hardly choose one part of this mess that is the most crucial, the problem. We can’t even tease one part out of all the rest. If we focus on this bit over here, we soon find that that bit over there is getting in the way of tackling the first bit. If we move on to the second one — ok, let’s get this thing out of the way and then we can solve the problem — then something else will also rear up in the way probably before the second bit is any more solved than the first. And this carries on in infinite regression. It’s a horrifying game of whack-a-mole, that carnival favorite in which you take a rubber mallet and hit the mole on the head as it pops up out of each of a dozen or so holes. The more hits, the more points until you earn enough hit-points to win. As you no doubt can see, our poly-mess is like this game except not at all… because you need an infinite number of moles and holes, you earn no points for successfully hitting any of them so the game never ends, and the moles are all capable of becoming existential threats akin to standing underneath a rolling boulder.

Further, like our boulder thought experiment, we are all experiencing this mess in different ways, in different places, and in different times. Some of us are already daily coping with interwoven disasters. Real. Visceral. NOW. Largely unmitigated. Some of the disasters have effects that are strong in certain ecosystems and completely absent in others. Desert dwellers in the American Southwest are running out of water, for example, while in Vermont that not the issue. Vermont is a mountain state that is under water. There is no “solution” to either drought or flood. They are effects of our causes, but these are just things that happened as a natural course, completely predictable and irreversible — and unsolvable. But there is also no way to ameliorate the hurt suffered in both Arizona and in Vermont with the same salving actions. These are different hurts, unrelated except that we catalyzed both in our ignorance.

I am writing this blog to spread around my ideas of tools and salves that might be useful in many places and many situations. Here’s a quote from someone I generally deplore (but who was spot on, in this one case): “When crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” (Milton Friedman, one of the nastier boulder pushers…) One thing we (universal) do need (also universal) is lots of ideas lying around so that we (individuals) can choose what might help us to survive whatever (individual) part of the mess we inhabit. I guess you could say that I am curating a collection of ideas.

While there are some general ideas that might be usefully applied in many situations — like “produce as much of your food as possible” — many may turn out to be most practicable only where I live. I don’t live elsewhere to try out their effects in different situations. I can only say what works for me. This does not mean these ideas can’t be used elsewhere, with or even without adaptation. But the important thing for me is that these ideas are out there lying about, waiting for someone who might transform them to meet some other particular need. Indeed, some of the things that I talk about may not be helpful anywhere to anyone but me, but still… even those ideas are lying around, ready to inspire other ideas, other ways of considering the situation, other responses to the falling boulder.

What I am not doing is insisting on the primacy of one idea. Except perhaps communication.

Abraham Maslow, he of the very apt hierarchy of needs, once quipped that “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In our current multi-issue, there are many people holding hammers — and only hammers. They are, moreover, loudly squawking that hammers are the only tool that will “solve the problem”. The problem they see is not a multi-dimensional and monstrously mutating process that is working as it is supposed to in order to clean up us. The problem they see is not a complex interweaving of natural processes. The problem they see is a nail — and only a nail — because they are limited in their perception by the hammer in their hand. The hammer, they understand and can use… unlike the confounding and difficult responses that might be necessary to mitigate real harm.

There are many tools. There are many tools that I will never even encounter, but that will work quite effectively in some setting, somewhere, somewhen. There are many tools that can inspire the creation of new tools. (I happen to believe that these are the most productive and useful tools, but that might just be my opinion…) Some tools are deliciously elegant in their simple efficacy, just like a hammer. However, there is, probably, no omnipotent “hammer”. (Because there is no “nail”…) Anyway, a hammer is more of a cause than a response. And nails might not exist at all except in our artificially fabricated worlds.

On the other hand, hammers will be quite useful as we find ourselves lacking in shelter and transport and therefore in need of causation…

All these accumulated ideas — this wisdom gained in time and experience — point to the same general idea: there is no one path and on no path is there a problem we can solve. We are responding. This is an ongoing being-state, not a thing we do and are done. We are adapting to many different situations. We will never be done adapting. Because the future is not a nail that we can beat into submission. It is a mutable being of many beings, and one that we generally can’t comprehend, never mind control. The best we can do is have lots of ideas, lots of tools, lots of ways of thinking, all ready at hand when crises of whatever flavor come barreling down that hill.

Because it will come… both crises… and future… and the only thing we (universal) can do (also universal) is respond.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024