Failure to settle a dispute often comes down to ineffective discussion and exposure of full arguments. You know how it goes, two people meet their minds in order to achieve an agreement and make a collective decision. Both people come at it with preconceptions and expectations, definitions and pre-packaged assumptions, sometimes flawed assumptions, or even subconscious assumptions with an attitude of resistance towards explaining and justifying them ‘It’s a fact and that’s that, take it or leave it’.

We tend to start from the end of an argument and work backwards until one party acquiesces, rather than beginning by laying out our assumptions to be picked apart and agreed upon before the real discussion begins. If the premises are not fully exposed and comprehended by each other, and the decision has high stakes, then the scene is set for a tortuous process, frustration, an on-going dispute, with failure to decide and take action. If either party resists the challenge to unpack their deeply held premises and justify them before they are admitted to the process of consensus and decision then the problem rumbles on towards resolving itself without us (and possibly with negative effects) while we continue to bicker and ‘chase the problem down’.

This is where we find ourselves in the theorised problem of civilisation. On the one hand we have those who are making predictions about over-population, environmental degradation, climate change, resource limits to growth, and problems resulting from social organisation, complexity and economics. On the other hand we have those who do not accept the warnings, arguing that the predictions are false and that the ‘problems’ are minor in the face of many possible solution scenarios. The level of concern expressed by the former tends to be matched by the level of denial voiced by the latter.

One denier of apocalypse, Professor Julian Simon (1932-1998), dismisses Malthus’ warnings of limits to growth, and Joseph Tainter’s and Jared Diamond’s further explorations into the increasing internal fragility of civilisation from complexity exponentially multiplying the problem of sheer numbers. His fundamental starting point is to dismiss limits to growth arguments by saying that future resources are unknowable and predictions about them should therefore not be admitted to the discussion. His denial is then formed around the idea that the more of us there are the better we will innovate and solve the problems – the title of his book The Ultimate Resource.

Simon has done what we all do when we have an idea that becomes a belief – we initially start seeking out ways to ‘prove’ it. Very often we do this by quickly skipping over the veracity of the fundamental assumptions, a technique which makes far easier the further process of demonstrating the truth of our idea. This is a form of compartmentalised thinking, and it carries through into the steps in our further argument as well. If contradictory parts of our case are drawn out by a challenger we are very good at denying the relationship (and even deleting the notion from conscious thought) then asserting that each component should be dealt with separately. And by the way, you may expect me to come in with this one here, some people such as those with Right Wing Authoritarian tendencies (see next paragraph for definition) display these abilities far more than the average. They make a caricature out of argument chopping, vetoing, and sometimes throwing the whole board game off the table and strutting off trying to look like the winner when they feel a challenger is getting close to the false foundations of their cherished beliefs. The Right is highly attuned to this, and they call it subversion. When you come across someone like this (about 10 percent of the population – 700 million people) and get into a discussion there is only one outcome – that they will win the argument by fair means or foul (Altemeyer, 2006).

The term ‘Right’ is used here in a psychological sense to describe a way of looking at the world which has a deep need for categorical certainty, social and environmental uniformity, and strong defence/denial mechanisms to protect the self in a world of uncertainty. It is the opposite of what we might call Ecological, a way of looking at the world which embraces uncertainty, has no categorical boundaries but instead continual process, and in which self-other distinctions are an illusion. Those with Ecological attitudes don’t see someone ‘subverting’ their argument, instead they see someone helping to enlighten them.

The other ninety percent of people by degree tend to be a lot easier to argue with, because although they initially start to look for ways to confirm a stated belief, when challenged they do then gradually expand their view in order to compare and contrast information that disconfirms their initial idea. Those at the opposite end of the spectrum to the Right won’t even appear to argue with you but will explore with you. To the majority then, their own idea is just a hypothesis alongside many other interlinked ideas, and with exploration and openness the truth will emerge when consensus builds. For the majority of people a winning argument is confident, always open to challenge, never absolutely certain, but one which we have a degree of certainty and high level of consensus in using as a basis for action. For the Right thinker however, a winning argument is the one that is driven through, and from which a sense of certainty is created through assertion and might. Once that is achieved the truth of the argument is held to be self-evident and they can drive on through.

So this is where we are at with issues like climate change. On the one side there is a building consensus (collective power) that we need to follow the precautionary principle and change what we are doing, in order to mitigate negative predicted scenarios based on empirical open research and probabilistic conclusions. On the other hand there are those whose beliefs and life path are set firmly for reasons of protecting the self (and individual power), and who do not want to embrace the cost and uncertainties of changing from business as usual, let alone accept the uncertainties of continual adaption that ecological thinking is now telling us is necessary. The former are seeking power-as-cooperation, the truth as process and change as evolution, while the latter are seeking power-as-right, and stasis through denial, while asserting this ‘truth’ as reality.

Moving from sub-linear to supra-linear: Permaculture? How narrow compartmentalised ‘single bottom line’ fragility is not only a characteristic of capitalism and corporations but civilisation (city-focused society) as a whole, based as it is on linear growth. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute points out unintentionally how the sublinear physical processes of the complex adaptive system we call civilisation are the wrong way ahead for our economic systems. In a world of infinite connectionism the city-based model may well collapse.

For me the question is not about continuing to invigorate the economy under the current model of cities but to change what we mean by city in information space: With information technology the city need no longer be a place of growing population density but a node of connection density. That node could be physically anywhere and everywhere – hence permaculture. Every family, every village hyper-connected informationally directly at its production centre, Gandhi’s ‘Swadeshi’ of the permacultural ecovillage transposed to the 21st cyber-century.

We have all the tools to do it, and what is inspiring to me is that it could just happen naturally (and with a little help from Rob Hopkins!), and may already be happening despite the warnings offered by Adam Curtis’ ‘All Watched Over By Graceful Loving Machines’.

If we can rewire our society for superlinear growth (a challenge and call to action for all connectionists!) then we stand a chance of solving today’s most critical problem – sustainability. One kind of rewiring I can envision is that of permaculture – a culture of complex technological problem solving situationally aware at its relocalised nodes physically connected to its core production process: Kaisen – immediate locatedness but interconnected informationally to the production process, The Soil, and the society that emerges directly around the natural processes which the soil gives life to. Hierarchical organisation is unsustainable, and there is a hyper-connected culture of cyber-cities superimposed over relocalised rhizome-distributed living styles, and it is heading our way.

‘Maybe we never left Eden after all. Maybe it was a kind of self-enforced exile’ -Simon G. Powell

Entheogens are substances which enhance our perception of the inherent intelligence in nature, its external-internal continuum. In the documentary Manna and the associated book The Psilocybin Solution Simon Powell discusses psilocybin’s potential to reawaken our ecological mind.

Entheogens may be a risky path for a very few people whose social, cognitive and technological conditioning is so extremely out of equilibrium with their natural self, deeply impoverished, so that when it is broken down they can become entirely lost or fractured and never become reintegrated as a person. The very small number of cases of enduring psychotic illness associated with cannabis or LSD underlines this risk. But it is such a small risk compared with the amazingly mind-body healing and spiritually educational experiences that entheogens offer. For most people entheogens are a path to self-nature rediscovery.

Psilocybin is one of the keys to the Doors of Perception. Once through this portal protecting the interconnected planet seems a fundamental concern greater than protecting our own self. If there ever was a strong and fast way of disconnecting people from the problem and reconnecting them with the solution, this is it. The sustainable development blue pill. I used to argue this case for ecological cognition – the ecocybermind – on my earlier blog United States of Consciousness and I will in due course repost some of those articles here. But in the meantime I will pose a few rhetorical questions from there for you to consider:

Why is it that cannabis appears to interfere with classroom learning and yet appears to be associated with supreme performance of learning juggling and other complex cerebellum processes or emotionally related behaviour? What is the difference between learning rules and classical systems, and learning things that can come more naturally or more environmentally driven? And why do authoritarians so like those former and abhor those latter? Why are ‘drugs so dangerous for society’?

Powell however, thankfully does not do this social critique but instead simply explains and illustrates the relationship between entheogens and self-organising systems so well, go and view/read his works:

Simon G. Powell’s documentary Manna

His book The Psilocybin Solution

Forthcoming on self-organising intelligence of nature Darwins Unfinished Business

My commentary (expanded) on the discussion on YouTube:Manna about critiquing science:

I make the distinction between science and perception of self-organising systems as follows:

Science (and human thought to date) has been based on classical principles of ordering concepts and knowledge about the universe in a very simplistic linear way. I call this classical thinking.

From the new physics (and perhaps from Capra onwards) we have started to see the world as a more complex chaos continuum which cannot fit the classically rigid paradigm. I call this ecological thinking.

There is a psychological analogy/explanation for this which I have worked on in looking at neural network simulations of levels of functional consciousness. We have two brains – the old brain which works along self-organising environmentally driven processes (ecological), and the new brain which tries to categorise and apply other simplistic orders of concept to the world (classical). And of course these two perceptual-cognitive paths are deeply interconnected – to assume they are two and distinct would be an example of classical thinking!

Science is still ordered and encultured within a classical rule-based context. This is the problem we have with science – it is an abstracted reducted simplification of reality and should not be used to generate predictions as confidently as it currently is. I speak as a scientist.

Why does he keep on about this book ‘The Authoritarians’? What has it to do with sustainability and resilience? The answers are all there in the book: The personality condition known as Authoritarian Follower (RWA) and their counterparts the Social Dominance Oriented (SDO) leaders are what lead to Hitler’s Germany and many other violent and murderous socio-political systems. It also threatens our planet.

And as the author Prof. Bob Altemeyer explains so well in this book, things appear to be moving that way again over the past couple of decades in America. I would add that it seems to be emerging more generally in the West. Recall that it was both Bush’s and Blair’s authoritarian single-mindedness that prepared and precipitated the Iraq war. People like them are known as ‘double highs’ they are both RWA and SDO and tend to look like sociopaths. But sociopathy is a misreading, if we understand the elements of the RWA/SDO embrace we can more effectively identify how their dynamic works – and we might potentially find ways to counter its highly damaging and disproportionate influence in our world.

Read the book and you will see the authoritarian spectre writ large in or societies and in smaller ways among the people all around you. Understanding the Authoritarian dynamic is to me one of the keys for humanity to survive this century. As Altemeyer’s experiments showed, the RWA/SDO embrace leads to just the kind of geo-political conflict that we see all around us; but when you put low RWA-SDO people in charge of the simulation more intelligent collective decisions are made. I will go so far as to put it in bold: In a century starting with Fear the authoritarian condition can potentially spread like an epidemic. This may already be happening.

My personal interest in the Authoritarian Personality has a lot to do with my green perspective. Green is not really political in the sense that it is about the factual state of the limited physical planet we live on and what we must do in order to find biological equilibrium with our home planet and all the members of our household (ecology = the studying the home). Authoritarians however, have very little interest in such matters. They see environmentalism and ecology as irrelevant, as if somehow we can live without a planet at all. The illogic of that proposition barely registers in their narrow minds. Their SDO leaders are motivated by personal power, and their RWA followers motivated by ethnocentric group cohesion, certainty, aversion to fear, and a might-makes-right stance that simply cannot be reasoned with. They do not understand climate change, they do not understand complex topics like ecology. They as Sheeple only think in terms of the simple truths and lies repeated by their leaders who use a particular set of tools in order to achieve this control dynamic. These tools and the RWA-SDO embrace deserve everyone’s attention.

Read The Authoritarians (free online at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/) with a foreword by republican Sen. John Dean, and understand why many people you engage with every day think and act as they do; from their comments on world events, to family dynamics, reluctance to think and discuss with any depth, child abuse, the way the media works, and on and on. You will also quickly start to spot the authoritarian style in political and other group leaders – people like your boss (double highs) and their RWA lieutenants. Authoritarians are a minority (about a third of the population) but their aggressiveness, dogmatism, inability to reason, reluctance to look at facts, and blind self-centred single-mindedness has the power to control us all as has so often happened in the past and to push us over the precipice socially (unnecessary wars), economically (wealth imbalances), and ecologically (I risk sounding like an authoritarian by saying this is our ‘biggest problem’ – read the book). I also recommend a version audio book narrated by Bob Altemeyer (Cherry Hill Publishing). This is a highly engaging and accessible performance of his life’s work on Authoritarianism. I listened to it three times in succession, I do highly recommend this version.

Solutions

For my green and social activist friends Prof Altemeyer offers suggestions in dealing with these people who will not be reasoned with or even look at facts: Embrace them and find super-ordinate goals, that is join their group, don’t directly challenge them, let them experience you as a person not an environmental activist and quickly their sense of group-civic responsibility will have you working together on issues which unite you. They can’t be reasoned with, but if you show a little leadership on little things – as Altemeyer illustrates, some basic neighbourhood environmental tasks like garbage clearing – and you will have won them over without proselytising. In time you can become a leader, they respect and will then readily follow those they perceive to be strong people, strong leaders and protectors of their need for certainty. Can you step up to that role of leadership without losing your integrity?

Do not make distinctions between the political left and right, or say green versus capitalist. Conservatism and Progressivism both include authoritarians although there tend to be more of them among conservative thinkers, and more of them among capitalist than green thinkers. Accept that we all have degrees of this trait in us which can easily switch on to become vicious and murderous, understand and accept it in yourself ‘My name is Alastair and I am a potential Nazi’ -a paraphrasing from the book. Bob Altemeyer points out that our society gives us almost no training in resisting obedience to [I would add here ‘illegitimate’] authority. Quite the opposite given the general state of our contemporary education systems.

As Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo discovered , some two thirds of us will give in and commit potentially horrific actions when authority gives us the orders and permissions. Never fall into the trap of believing that you would not be susceptible – Milgram’s experimental participants all thought they could never go as far as to execute someone under orders but the carefully manipulated experiment showed that 62% were prepared to do just that. Learning how to say no and carefully (very carefully) lead others into the No group is a key part of the solution.

People in North Africa have just stood up so bravely and hopefully successfully against authoritarian systems. It can be done, and with greater awareness we could sideline its effects everywhere and develop some kind of truly representative intelligent democracy or better. There has been a diminution in respect for illegitimate authority during the second half of the 20^th century, probably connected with the way we have been able to move, communicate aside of authority-hierarchy, and find real education, and this mature approach is increasing. However, if you Google ‘respect for authority’ you will see a strong backlash emerging, the Religious Right (both Christian and Islamic fundamentalists) as analysed in the book is one hot spot of this backlash. After reading Altemeyer’s book you will likely quickly identify that backlash as originating in the minds and groups of RWA’s and their SDO leaders. We need to be fully aware of what drives Authoritarianism and how to emasculate it if we are to make the world a more peaceful, democratic, sustainable home.

With greater awareness of the authoritarian dynamic our world could be led towards taking more effective collective and consensual decisions, away from conflict and partisan self-destructiveness. If anyone would like to join me in developing a taxonomy of the most effective education and training in resisting illegitimate authorities: this a current project of mine, as is the use of George Lackoff’s reframing theory in order to disarm the power that SDO’s have in leading the mass of RWA’s. Please get in touch alastairmcgowan@live.co.uk There is also a Facebook group Authoritarian Watch.

Finally, I would also like to make reference to a related audio book from Cherry Hill Publishing, The Philadelphia Report in which aspects of the RWA-SDO embrace can be seen in a Catholic child abuse abomination. http://www.cherryhillpublishing.com/About%20Philadelphia%20Report.htm

Negative Interest Currency or ‘Stamp Scrip’

The Stamp Scrip Monetary System is an elegant solution for sustainability, poverty, and for flattening the economic power hierarchy of the current state of capitalism. I have turned this idea over and over in my head since I learned of it ten years ago. The more I have thought about it this seems to be an ideal solution for the economic and environmental crunch we are in:

• The cash in your pocket effectively devalues by a regular amount – there is a cost to holding it
• Tested and worked well in 1930s and favoured by Keynes for situations such as the perfect storm we currently face
• Money circulates more rapidly improving the money supply and avoiding the liquidity trap without debt
• Mimics natural systems – there is a cost to maintaining it so purchase decisions must favour sustainability and inherent value
• Consumers and traders favour long term criteria in their purchases – durable goods and sustainable investments
• Money cannot be hoarded – money does not work for you unless you work hard with the money – the more money you have the harder you have to work in order to make that money provide you with what you want
• Trickle down has a better opportunity to work – economic activity can be more easily ‘mopped up’ in a decentralised way rather than being drawn in to monopolies
• True economic power comes from innovations and long term thinking not ‘economies of large scales’
• The downside is that it is not good for bankers or financial industries who lose central control over money flows and money storage. And they are a powerful lobby.

See this website for a brief introduction http://www.transaction.net/money/gc/gc01.html#stamp

And this article for more in depth https://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/commentary/2008/0408.pdf 

Also see this Dissident Voice article from 2009 by George Monbiot that highlights the suitability of stamp scrip for our present situation http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/a-better-way-to-make-money/

The information society, open source knowledge, and efficient peer-to-peer problem solving represent an immense step forward, a revolution in problem solving that could help overgrow previous social structures based on high energy waste.

Joseph Tainter argues that we are in this current mess because problem solving is making civilization more and more energy inefficient. However, this inefficiency also stems from the hierarchical social organisation of civilization. Capitalism is an outgrowth of this form of organisation which seriously restricts energy flows to loci where problems could be solved far more efficiently. Simply put: hierarchy does not permit a free market of utility in any useful sense.

Break the hierarchy and the free market will permit energy to flow to that genius kid on the streets of a slum who will be the one to solve a key technical problem for us and our planet. You guess at the problem, s/he will solve it if given the knowledge resources. Capitalism has proven useful for this to a very small degree. But open source, legal hacking, distributed information structures, free peer-to-peer information flow can achieve many multiples better than capitalism.

Am I arguing against intellectual property? Well yes, if you like. If that’s what does it. If that’s what permits creative minds to connect and solve the world’s problems, educate each other, overgrow the hierarchical establishment and develop what Jeff Vail calls a society based on Rhizome.

This article I wrote at Dissident Voice (linked below) describes the Authoritarian Personality and its role in politics, specifically in terms of fascism.

The basic traits from Bob Altemeyer’s research on the subject is described and illustrated. The traits of fascism are listed in relation to the Tea Party movement. The same characteristics however can be easily seen in many groups – eg in Britain we have the BNP and UKIP expressing a similar pattern exemplifying the authoritarian embrace.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/11/the-politics-of-fear/

In modern democracy we trust. But it is precisely in the context of modern industrial democracy that fascism – bred by right wing authoritarianism – can take a hold. The article linked here at Cognitive Policy Works (George Lakoff’s spin off from the Rockridge Institute) refers to current events in the US but other Western states are also facing tough economic conditions and a period of decline and change – fertile ground for fascism to grow.

‘In Britain? That’s implausible.’ Never underestimate the power of the 10-12 percent full blown authoritarians and the 25 percent whose fear traits are switched on during times of hardship and change. Their power and occasional violence can infect and control an entire nation, and when it has started, as Sara Robinson argues below, it is unstoppable. The US is at a tipping point.
http://www.cognitivepolicyworks.com/2010/10/22/fascist-america-is-this-election-the-next-turn/

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a writer deeply focused on the machinations of the security apparatus. He is also a multidisciplinary analyst who is now seeing what we from the sustainability perspective have seen for decades. This is that it is all interconnected: A world of finite resources, the fundamental drivers of the hierarchical social order we call civilisation, and conflict, are deeply and powerfully interrelated. To solve the growing crisis of civilisation we need to spread the consciousness of this situation and advocate proactive and deliberate positive cooperative action from the world’s leaders.

In 2009 Joseph Tainter warned again about the way complex societies collapse.  (a transcript can be found here http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5745). Tainter is of the view that reducing complexity is not a viable long term solution and that increasing problem solving though socio-economic complexity is required because ‘…long-term sustainability depends on solving major societal problems that will converge in coming decades’ However, what he does not explore in this talk and his is the ways in which both complexity and sustainability can increase.