February 2.

2025-02-02T14:40:55Z

February 2. Thanks Roger for digging up this 2013 blog post from The Automatic Earth, Quote of the Year. The quote is from one of the authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report, that "we are going to evolve through crisis (my italics), not through proactive change." The idea is, forget about reducing consumption to prevent resource exhaustion and climate change, because that's not what humans do. "We don't change course in order to prevent ourselves from hitting boundaries. We hit the wall face first, and only then do we pick up the pieces and take it from there."

That would have been a cynical take in the 1990s, and was unusual enough in 2013 to inspire that post, but in 2025 I think it's the conventional wisdom. Only wild-eyed optimists think we're not going to hit that wall.

Here's a Limits to Growth simulator where you can set parameters and plot some curves, all of them falling. The most interesting critique I've seen of this model, was where someone applied it to the past. I forget if it was the year 1500 or 1700, but the model made the same prediction: collapse within a few decades, which obviously didn't happen. Instead, human ingenuity found ways to keep the game going. For the same reason, here we are buzzing around in SUVs in 2025, when twenty years ago every peak oiler ran the numbers and proved that was impossible.

This leads me back to psychism. It's almost like the numbers will do whatever they have to do, to back up whatever humans want to do. If reality is a dream, then maybe the momentum of modern living pulled fracking out of a hat. But one way or another there are limits, if not in matter than in mind. What appears, to matter, like the conquest of inert nature, appears to mind like cutting ourselves off from the greater reality, turning away from God. If "progress" means replacing the nonhuman world with the human world, then the limit is how deeply we can go into our own obsessions, before we're too insane to maintain the complex systems on which our progress depends.

I'm playing a lot of Spirit Island, a game where you play nature spirits fighting colonizers, and there's something called a Fear victory: Even if the island is packed with towns and cities, if you get enough fear points, you win. So I'm wondering, what would that be like for the colonizers, to have all that success on the physical level, and still fail on the psychological level? Maybe they turn against each other in adversarial politics and compulsive tribalism. Everyone is cynical and opportunistic, or worn out and depressed. The rich flee to better islands, while public services are slashed and the streets are full of muttering homeless. Yeah, I live there.

Ran Prieur

February 2.