Egypt, Libya, Ivory Coast – Upside of Down
Like a bowling ball rolling ever faster down the lane, the wave of public protests against vicious dictatorships is sweeping across the poorest countries of the world with the United States weighing in with its own, albeit less violent mass movement in Wisconsin.
I keep thinking back a few years when I read The Upside of Down : Catastrophe, Creativity, and the renewal of civilization, by Thomas Home Dixon. A laundry-list type of notes from that book is found here
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And following is a shortened version of those same notes – pertaining more specifically to the social and political upheavals currently happening in the world.
The central purpose of this book is to help us recognize the signs and prepare for breakdown in world peace and civil order.
Stresses are accumulating deep beneath the surface of our contemporary societies.
Population stress arising from differences in populaiion growth rates between rich and poor societies and from spiralling growth of megacities in poor countries
These stresses in combination with what Homer Dixon calls multipliers will make breakdown more likely, widespread, and severe. These multipliers are:
1. Rising speed and global connectivity of our activities, t3echnologies, and societies
2. Escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people
“Especially worrisome is the spread of lethal technologies that have raised destructive power of angry and violent people. Technologies that provide killing power to fanatics, insurgents, and criminal gangs. Never before has it been possible for small groups to destroy entire cities.This one fact will ensure our future is entirely different from our past.”
In 1950 there were about 2 poor people for every rich person on Earth; today there are about 5; this has grave implications for world peace
Discrepancy between rich and poor and the poor’s knowledge of it because of technology. Migration of young men especially at interfaces between rich and poor regions (US and latin America; Timor and Australia; North Africa and Europe).
Features of rapid urbanization in poor countries (43% of whom live in slums) and their inherent problems includes; (weakness of governance and police, crime and gangs, extreme income discrepancies – rich resorts and gated communities next to slums); also the growth and number of mega-cities.
Young men, out of school, out of work and charged with hatred.
15-29 year old cohort of young men is 40% or more of the population in Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. Makes up 50% or more in the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iran, Kenya, Nigeria, Syria, and Yemen
Likelihood of violence in our world is the power shift allowing fewer people to kill large numbers of people more quickly than ever before. This is particularly visible in poor countries that have been flooded with small arms and light weapons. This gives militias, ethic groups, political factions, and gangs the opportunity to wreak havoc. Places like Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and eastern Congo have experience this resulting in the virtual collapse of govt authority. Organized crime and armed militias have quickly filled the vacuum
Things could go one of two ways in a social earthquake:
1. Fanatics could frame reality and define a tumultuous future
2. Social creativity could shape the future
In order to achieve #2 above, we need to enact the following steps:
1. Reduce underlying stresses (population imbalances, energy shortages, environmental damage, climate change, income gaps) We need more integrated approaches to these problems. Need risk of weapons of mass destruction; secure and destroy enriched uranium (perhaps the most urgent). We’re unlikely to weaken these stresses enough to significantly reduce the danger we face so we need to prepare for social earthquakes
2. Cultivate a prospective mind – we need to be comfortable with change, surprise, transience; exercise our imagination otherwise we’re more likely to be afraid
3. Build a resilience into all systems critical to our well-being. Gi ve up extra efficiency and productivity to achieve resiliency (i.e. draw on support and resources from elsewhere BUT be self-sufficient enough to provide for essential needs in an emergency). We need to boost the resilience of the weakest societies, namely those with damaged environments, endemic poverty, inadequate skills and education, and those with weak and/or corrupt governments. Otherwsie the entire global socio-ecological system will become increasingly vulnerable to disease, terrorism, economic collapse. These goals go against the ideology of global capitalism (which calls for larger scale, faster growth, less government, more efficiency, connectivity, and speed). We currently work against resiliency by piling on debt, building track housing on agricultural land, use distant sources of energy, and “fill every nook and cranny of our days with so much junk information and pointless running around that we don’t have time to reflect on what we’re doing or where we’re going”.
Rich countries need to find alternatives to blind commitment to economic growth which is incompatible with the Earth’s long term viability. Globalized capitalism sees economy as separate from nature and acts like a machine whose operation is linear, predictable, and reversible. We need to recognize there are no good substitutes for biodiversity and a benign climate. We need to find ways to give these explicit economic value so that people are motivated to protect them. Conventional economics is dominated by intellectual rationalization of today’s world order.
Characteristics of adaptive complex systems :
1) Extraordinary diversity
2) Decentraliation of power and decision-making
3) Systems are unstable enough to experience unexpected innovations yet orderly enough to learn from their failures and successes.
Systems with these three characteristics stimulate constant experimentation and generate a number of problem-solving strategies.
The internet provides us with the potential for this kind of system. Unfortunately, we have barely tapped the potential of the internet because instead of its being used for problem-solving, adaptation, and social inclusion, it has turned into a venue for “a screaming cacophony of electronic narcissism”.
Open source materials need to be used fro problem-solving, not just technical programming.
“In western liberal societies, public discussion of values is dreadfully impoverished”
Re: consumerism: we get drawn into discussions about superficialities because of this dearth of value debate. This serves the interests of the political and economic elites who value growth above all else.
Only a broader and deeper democratic practice will develop the expansive moral commonwealth essential to our collective e survival.
We must acknowledge that our global situation is urgent and begin wide-ranging and vigorous discussion about what we can and should do.
