The deceit of "Progress"

Why do society’s leaders, the elites, keep foisting new adventures on the populace? Often motivated by fear or adventure, such as “othering” another nation as an excuse for an arms race, redirecting production for the imagined competition with the Soviets to reach the Moon, Space adventurism consuming wealth and materials, and pitiless notions of keeping the planet cool during an interglacial period. And the “investment” in the race to the Moon in the 1960s has not been paid off yet. Each of these schemes (and many others) are an unnecessary extension of “Progress,” a drastic increase in social complexity and a drain on the potential of the human project. And the ridiculous attempts to colonize Mars represent costs with not just diminishing returns, but very negative value for cost. This distortion of values and excessive burden of increasing complexity and stress on the population are a detriment to human existence rather than a benefit.

The following section is my interpretation of a review titled “Fragile, impermanent things,” an interview of Joseph Tainter by Jessica McKenzie. For a limited time, you can read the full article at The Bulletin or find it in the March 2025 issue of The Bulletin’s digital magazine “The Tipping Points Issue,” available now. For more background, you can read Joseph Tainter’s 1990 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/archaeology/archaeological-theory-and-methods/collapse-complex-societies

https://risk.princeton.edu/img/Historical_Collapse_Resources/Tainter_The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies_ch_1_2_5_6.pdf

The complexity of a society has a metabolic cost; increasing complexity requires increasing costs in acquiring ever more input, whether quantity of money, natural materials, labour input, etc. Our world-wide complex society, itself a deviation from past human attempts at civilizational complexity, is “fueled” by free fossil fuels, free in the sense that the Commons is not compensated by their extraction - all profit is subsumed by the “energy” companies. Thus complexity appears to be free, yet people continue to feel under increasing stress and workload with diminishing return. Complex societies are intended to be better-able to solve problems, yet on introspection, perhaps create more problems and bigger ones than they solve. And the increasing cost of maintaining even the status quo of a complex society grows exponentially, resulting in diminishing returns on investment. Yet each new problem that society faces requires an increase in complexity with the accordant increase in input costs.

Collapse of a society is a rapid loss of complexity. Throughout history, such collapses were not deliberately initiated, they were normally started by external factors. At this point in time, we have the most complex of all societies ever developed, the most damaging array of weapons and technology, with control of multiple impacts on all of civilization, with the Trump regime willfully reducing system complexity. What could go wrong?

In the complexity of human society worldwide today, the possibility of collapse is absolutely not being prepared for. In definition of complex society, those working in realms determined by capital flows require another class to provide their food, as I have mentioned previously, their work or schooling is so important that they cannot take the time nor have the land to produce their own food.

An old Russian proverb: “Богатых бы съесть деньги, если бедные не обеспечивают питание” or transliterated: “Bogatykh by s"yest' den'gi, yesli bednyye ne obespechivayut pitaniye” or auf Inglés: “The rich would have to eat money if the poor did not provide food.” And historically, peasants have been passive spectators of the travails of the elites, since they and the land are one (see first few paragraphs of “Money is Fraud”) and they can watch and wait as leadership waxes and wanes and invaders come and go. Meanwhile, the inevitable and already-initiated collapse will be beyond imagination.

Joseph Tainter in the interview states that an intentional simplification of this complex society will not work because further problems always arise requiring increased complexity to deal with them. And it requires social awareness and consensus which necessitates the Great Mindshift. Attempts to pay for existing or yet even more complexity via non-fossil-fuels source of “free” energy will require even greater complexity and energy to implement, another Gordian knot. And a constant dependency on any energy supply opens possibilities for crises.

Joseph Tainter mentions the neo-liberal notions that claim there is no worry about resource shortages, since as long as there are price signals in free markets (and governments don’t get in the way), we can always innovate our way out of problems. But he maintains that this required innovation has costs, it increases complexity over time. Then again, with increasing complexity comes diminishing marginal returns, akin to running faster to stay in the same place. Soon, the cat collapses on the treadmill and shoots off the end onto the floor. And Tainter indicates that when society enters the stage of diminishing returns, not much more than the passage of time can bring about total failure (cat onto the floor).

He hopes to be able to teach people to be aware of what’s going on in the world, and search for indications of what is over the events horizon, to be prepared for an array of possibilities. And along the way, learn to accept another way of living with less consumption than people have been accustomed to.

That would in normal times be a hard sell, but the Trump regime, through its tariffs nonsense, will bring this home to Americans in short order, on-shoring world-level poverty rather than manufacturing. Thus world-awareness and retrenchment of life style may help avert catastrophe.

The “business mind” abstracts transactional relationships from the physical world into the monetary world, tokenizing everything, turning it all into numbers on a spreadsheet, to escape the bonds of empathy. That allows the exploitation of Nature, materials and human labour without concern for damage to any of the exploited entities. Thus the Values Crisis comes into play, where the conflict between numerical value and existential value cannot be resolved. Andrew Welsh writes about the Value Crisis to show the problems arising out of creating a numerical value for every observable entity. What is the value of a tree? It has an intrinsic value to itself, and to its biosphere and larger diffuse values to all life on Earth. Yet some people try to assign a numerical value to that tree so that numerical value can essentially be stolen and placed in a column of their spreadsheet. If it is entered in the credits column, its value can supposedly offset some liability in the debits column, even though that liability might be valued on an entirely different set of standards. That numerical value is deemed stolen because it is extracted from the tree’s intrinsic value and essentially patented by the thief so that nobody else can extract that same value from that tree. And they lack proper authority to steal that value - no human-appointed arbiter can offer that authority legitimately. Again, this theft of an abstracted numerical value from an entity with intrinsic value presumes to negate responsible empathy for the entity itself. The business mind wishes to numerate everything in its world to create an illusory overlay of an economic reality in order to restructure its profit system with complete disregard for the consequences to others. That brings a moral crisis to the values crisis. But of course, morality is another value; try putting a price on that one.

Meanwhile, our dear leaders and titans of business continue to distract us with supposedly exciting new adventures, or new geopolitical “threats,” lest we peek under the scaffolding underpinning civilization and behold the void.

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