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What is Fascism?
Tuesday, September 30th, 2014Who cares what fascism is? We in the US should, because elements of it are creeping into our society, activated on an as-needed basis at present to keep its development somewhat below the radar of the masses. Because the term is so often misused, here I will summarize a relatively rigorous conception of fascism like [...]
The Alchemy of Language in the Pacification of the American People
Monday, July 14th, 2014Orwell’s term “doublethink”[1], the use of language to create a false picture of reality, has spawned a large literature, but that exposure has not stopped powerful interests from inventing new ways to use the capacity of language to control thought.
Something primed me many years ago to automatically search for the camouflage, innuendo, and outright misrepresentation [...]
Locked In: The Paradox of Capitalism
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014Much of this post was lifted from an article by another author, because I found the logic and the language so compelling. But I neglected to keep the reference. If I learn who the author is, I will be happy to credit him/her with those statements that are not mine, and provide a link to [...]
Folk Tales, Foreign Policy, and the Value of Systems Thinking
Thursday, January 30th, 2014In the tale of the boy who cried wolf, a boy who is tending sheep and serving as a lookout for wolves seeks to relieve his boredom and gain attention by crying wolf when in fact there is no wolf. This decision/policy succeeds for a while, then it no longer works. A systems thinking [...]
Why Systems Thinking?
Thursday, January 23rd, 2014My explicit focus on systems thinking in writing and teaching comes from an awareness, spreading slowly through the knowledge business, that it is an essential approach to all inquiry intended for application to real world problems. For its importance to be taken seriously and applied to all important issues in everyday life, systems thinking needs [...]
The Future of Industrial Society: “Progress”, A Microscopic Scientific Paradigm, and Blowback
Thursday, January 2nd, 2014Nothing is more important to understanding the behavior of a large social entity than awareness of its collective worldview. Usually that worldview is so deeply embedded and taken for granted that its inhabitants rarely know that it exists and shapes their individual and collective behavior in many ways. A common parallel is fish who do [...]
What systems thinking reveals: from biology to political economy
Saturday, February 9th, 2013The way we do science today suffers greatly from the dominance of the reductionist paradigm. A general pattern has emerged where technologies based on purely reductive science work for a while as expected, then start to produce unexpected and often unwanted results, outcomes that at least from a reductionist perspective are a surprise and are [...]
Scenarios of Political Response to Energy Descent Crises
Sunday, December 9th, 2012A number of students of the energy descent have concluded that the new era will include tipping points where key economic and political institutions suddenly go into crisis[1]. Charles Hugh Smith, for example, describes “snapback” points[2] when increasing divergence between “phantom wealth” and real wealth collapses. In The Case for a Disorderly Descent I described [...]
Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios
Monday, October 8th, 2012This article was originally reviewed, edited and published by Tompkins County Relocalization, a group in upstate New York that is researching various aspects of energy descent.
“A city could be defined, almost, as a human ecosystem that grossly exceeds the carrying capacity of its local environment.” – William Catton
The vulnerability of cities and suburbs in [...]
How Many People Can the World Really Hold?
Monday, October 1st, 2012Spreading awareness that the human population is in overshoot of the carrying capacity of the planet has led to a number of attempts to calculate what the true carrying capacity might be. My objective here is not to provide another calculation, but to explore some issues that need to be faced to address the question [...]
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