Joseph Tainter vids – Collapse of Complex Societies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddmQhIiVM48

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkK06A32tTU&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgeP_NTCs_Q&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vLQekiVsB8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhTKirUZiWQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub1DY-VRh4A&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x8y3qF0YYQ&feature=related


Well worth watching as a high-powered lecture. But, like most US academics, Tainter seemingly has no clue about class politics. Eg., he neither sees nor recognises the debilitating effect of socio-political conservatism in ancient Rome or modern West. The patrician class of Rome was not in the least interested in any innovation that threatened its ancient privileges & practises - so Roman society could not adapt to changed conditions. Very much like our present Schweinerei.

Can you/he seriously imagine the banking/aristocratic mafia of today allowing some scientist or inventor to produce a cheap generator of clean energy? It would wipe out all the investement in oilfields & refineries. It would change the economic & power relations of the whole world. Such a guy would end as a smear on the pavement.

BP

quote bamberpanda :It would change the economic & power relations of the whole world. Such a guy would end as a smear on the pavement.

thats right panda !. and i wonder just how many such other such guys have ended up as apparant suicides or supposed drug overdoses or some other death in suspicious circumstances

brian1939,

the cheap energy story is sprinkled with mysterious deaths & burned-down laboratories! Another tactic is to ignore or/& portray the inventor as a buffoon. Here's just one sad example -

http://www.rexresearch.com/pacheco/pacheco.htm


But the world needs more than a technological fix. The way things are, it is incapable of helping itself. Yet, things are stirring in a big way. President Bojangle's & Europe's best idea for helping Libya was to drop bombs on it. I hear the president has been impeached by Congress for starting a war w/out a vote. Good! BP

what? we are experiencing .... ?
eschatology - never heard of: "my" (dis-owning?) zeitgeist-forbears may not have added the right dosage of optimism to the straight jackets of utilitarian futures. imho.

i.o.w.: where does communication end and manipulation begin?

two wolves with the choices to interpret information? about the same food?

who pays for the impeachment? voters' reps?

Looking at first 4 parts of Tainter lecture, this is good:

"When the Romans seized the gold store at Carthage, Roman tax was ended...

The Romans ran entirely on solar energy. When the Romans would conquer a province, they would seize all the accumulated solar wealth."

In the long run, we will freeze to death.

The crazy thing is how wealth can move from place to place, woosh from Egypt to Rome, Illyria, etc. Ownership of big social machines changes. How does the wealth of the sun get into the diamonds? It does not. You can't eat money. The capitalist has an easy answer to this: forget the gold standard: carbon credits, quite literally: carbon coins of super-charged carbohydrate-lipids; energy banks in crystalline near absolute-zero streets.

How did the desire or disappointment get into the rubies for one, and for two, if no one can see all those rubies, how can the ownership of this beauty (shininess presumably was their original value) continue to have value? Perhaps because the repressive (selection) power of empire is actually more important than it's productive? Modern homelessness is not poverty. When someone says: these American homeless have it easy, think of the Third-World, this is a fallacy; in the Third World poverty has a different meaning from refugee column: American homelessness is refugee status in terms of persecution, disease, malnutrition, trauma, rape brutality, transient etc. Capitalism is a war zone, thus there are refugee columns in the central business districts of American cities. Capitalism refugees appear to self select, but this is actually not true as it is caused by field and instruction: the homeless feels like a debased wretch and so acts this out. Global feelings are connected. The famous rider after Waterloo who informs Rothschild who can speculate on the market is similar to the speed of the nervous system. The state would be overgrown by weeds without its stern anti-productive defenses. The state does not want all its stored metabolites to be reacted in one place or another but only in certain places otherwise the strength of the reaction is lost as it is related to a pressure inequality: i.e. a membrane is silhouette.

The part about the debasing of coinage could be a message of anarchy about states, or about the game of money. As I say before, money is very central to what it means to be human in the sense of being language, the principal of equivalency, Universal Computation: this means sentience, but possibly despite how well ATP works, money is not a good system for us. A problem with money is value sinks. For example, Tainter talks of the many Roman coins in India, they are like the oil under the Earth rediscovered later. Now that we have video lectures and video phone, maybe we can forget reading? And so also forget money.

The fuck up is that money always runs out. Therefore: don't base any productive system on money. The money running out is not because of using gold or paper or lipid money, it's to do with the nature of money. The reason is because money is the negative or shadow: it is somehow classic slight of hand: when we see the money, we are missing the rest of the performance in a blind-spot created by seeing the money. Money is pain. And pain is hurt locker.

The crazy part is the gold. You can't eat it. "When the Roman seized the gold of Parthia." But it can be metabolized amazingly. The cell finds a store of usable energy. How? Obviously because empire doesn't eat sun. !!!!!!! Empire is a system, and it's parts are organic, but empire is not a bionic animal. Empire eats fear.

Not to be critical of Tainter at all, his learning is very vast, but every 12 year-old boy who plays sim games already understands the economy of expansion/annual empire, solarity, and the problem with always running out of money. Tax is the replacement for war. East and West Rome was also tried with some bacteria with double nucleus. Some of the Ediacaran biota (I think) actually had sub-animals at the ends of their limbs like symbiotes at the organism level.

The easiest way to explain humanity and civilization is as horses who have broken themselves, tamed themselves, stabled themselves.

Society can not be sustainable at the moment without the Earth, we have no way of making sunlight, heat, etc into usable chemical energies for our body. At some time in the future we may really regret we burnt all that oil and made all those plastic bottles, as at this rate we are gonna go through all available organic molecules, not just for energy, but for structure. This is the big problem with domes and the possibility of living in space etc, humans are heterotrophs way down the chain of molecule construction, without the Earth we are quite dead as we require it to produce thousands of molecules we cannot produce with the human body or with our technologies. And worse, the amount of energy required to produce all those organic molecules is so vast (the whole history of the Earth) we may not be able to produce them ourselves in order to make ourselves with. The old pull yourself up by your boot-straps/perpetual motion machine problem.

QUOTE IMP-PULSE :fate or insight ahead of us?.

To those in CHRIST , insight ahead of us BUT to those not in CHRIST ... FATE ahead of us

i fully agree, yet there is much cultural and psychological integration to be worked at.

just reading about terrence malick's new movie, the protestant "home churches" in china, the antics on facebook, the tacky political and military conflicts in libya and syria, to name but a few.

"being in christ", yet \!! pitted against anyone UNLIKE "us" (solid, not unnecessarily "challenged"!): sounds like "if i am in christ, you cannot be" all too often.

Loop,

well put.

Eisenstein (current reading) summed it. Is our culture dying from physical or cultural entropy? If physical (no more resources), then we cannot replace them if the macro universe itself is entropy-in-progress. On the other hand, replacement/renewal is possible if the universe is ‘steady state’. As an idealist (not a materialist), I must choose the steady state option, in which case, the Big Bang is illusory, along with materialism.

Those who were not asleep at the back when I gave my stupendous & galaxy-shaking e-lecture, ‘Creation/Creativity & Evolution, may recall; pertinently, social & all evolution is driven by creation/creativity. Hands up all who remember. Bugger, not one. Ah well! But keep in mind the principle. Our present system stifles creativity, becoz it is a-moral, so inhuman. If we cannot see our connexions to all humanity, nor to our physical universe, we are intellectually lobotimized. In that condition, we are unable to shape up to the dangers we ourselves generate.


"When the Romans seized the gold store at Carthage, Roman tax was ended...

The Romans ran entirely on solar energy. When the Romans would conquer a province, they would seize all the accumulated solar wealth."

Not sure I’d agree with Tainter there, if that’s all he wants to say. Until nukes, sun power was all everybody had, surely? Wood & fossil fuels are just old, stored sun power, AFAIK.

Rome was a parasitic state, never very innovative. It arose by robbery with violence – all empires do, as Loop said. This was only possible since surrounding cultures had developed sufficiently to accumulate wealth worth stealing. As Tainter said, Rome was wasted by diminishing returns. After having taken the rich, easy, local pickings, further conquests were of poorer, more distant regions (eg, Britain, Germany). That meant long & expensive communications routes – less & less worth the investment in troops & ships. And, the greater the areas conquered, the greater the expense of defending very long frontiers.

All frontiers are membranes. Roman techniques slipped thru to ‘barbarians’ – lost cultural capital, & free intelligence to enemies. As with the sale of advanced military technology to modern China, there are always those willing to sell anything for a fast buck. General rule, the richer the seller, the more treacherous & unscrupulous. Wars are made by the rich & fought by the poor. As most/many of the richest are paths, they have no conscience anyhow.

Agreed, money is always subject to its own entropy of falling value. The faster an economy grows, the more its currency moves around & devalues. Gold, precious stones, etc., tend to hold their independent value becoz they embody much human labor in finding &/or mining them. But of course, prior to that, people had to desire them to go to all that trouble – ideal-based value.

Currency has the value we impute to it. Value is a socially-shared idea. It moves & oscillates thru time. That is why a corp may ‘promise’ the money from New York, yet have a factory built in Shanghai with no actual money exchanged. The promissory note may itself also be sold on as a value item – so debts become assets, both of value.

Time itself can be made a source of money value. “I’ll borrow 100, & pay back 120 in 12 months’ time”. Today, all money circulating in the West is debt, a ‘promise to pay’. The system works as long as we believe that (confidence). The bulk of money is accumulated from the work/contributions of dead people. It enslaves the living. It has no intrinsic power. Its power is the ideas we have in our heads, more solid than iron bars.

Fall of Rome? I favor the theory that Rome decayed becoz it was fundamentally a crude, barbarian system, dragged up as a civilization, a vicious old queen behind the powder & paint. There is a limit to which such a debased, murdering thug can be refined. Rome had bloody circusses, Greece had theaters.
Rome was politically, socially & technically conservative. It was a beggar in new ideas. So when its fortunes changed, it was incapable of radical adaptation. Ie., it ran out of cultural capital. Ideas rule!

Rome’s culture was Greek, suitably debased. We know late Greece had developed advanced levels of knowledge & technology – the idea of steam power had appeared there. Rome fed off them, but did not advance them. It clung to inefficient slavery, ignoring Athens’ limited democracy.

Rome’s patriciate never tried the adventure of capitalism. Most of the deals of the very, very rich involved contracts with or for the state – cronyism. So Rome’s leaders were parasites within a parasitic system – very like Western banks today.

If the crisis of the West today were really energy shortage, as Tainter suggests, one would expect to see research on the scale of the Manhattan Project, with thousands of scientists & technicians in organized pursuit of new, radical, cheap energy sources. Alas, no chance! Tainter cannot see why this is, becoz he’s a professional academic. He has no view of class politics, that’s too radical. He has no incentive to delve into the nasty affairs of those who pay his wages. He gets a little radical (nice!), then sheers off, just before his tenure might be at risk. It’s possible he is completely unaware of this (cog-thinking).

As well, our ‘leaders’ respond like Rome’s senators did. As the Vandals approach the gates, they sit around, polishing their piles on marble benches, arguing & worrying about their profitable rackets. This is not conducive to creative thinking. Inhumanity, war-mentality & greed seldom are, since all values are ultimately inter-connected, & rooted in ethical values. When a culture suffers moral rot, creative constipation sets in, then social gangrene, & then it’s dead. BP

QUOTE IMP-PULSE:i fully agree,


Miracles still happen

imp-pulse,

miracles, yes, but we should not passively rely on them. We are required to make some input in the miracle-making processes. BP

Loop,

“Nuclear power is sun power too.”

That’s the majority view, but there is minority dissent. I’m too science-ignorant to decide, so agnostic.


“This must have set the limits of empire. Mongols could get bigger than Rome or China only because they did it fast before it could catch up with them.”

The limits of empire are set by the available communications technology (H Innis). The original Mongols could not run an empire, so reverted to default position – itinerant sheep molesters - except those who replaced the previous ruling dynasty in China, so became Chinese. Let’s face it, they were top-notch at military destruction, but otherwise, ignorant, smelly, ugly a-holes. Lest I be accused of racism, I’d say Alexander et al were same, but very lovely, perfumed a-holes (literally & metaphorically).


“Which came first, time or space?”

Logically, they arrived together as a conjugate variable, propelled by creation/creativity. There can be no time w/out matter, w/out movement. You just have a featureless, atemporal void – stasis – where nothing moves or happens


“I think he knows but he can't say due to his employer. This comes out in the Q&A part. He makes some loaded remarks suggesting he knows this but mustn't speak to the point.”

Likely – discretional lockjaw! But what a terrible situation. Universities are supposedly places where the smartest are allowed to pursue the truth, & express it, whatever the outside society thinks. When a society ceases to speak the truth to itself, it’s finished. Academic freedom & freedom of expression are not add-on luxuries. They are survival necessities. BP

Watched the rest of the Q&A. I always feel mean to say this, and elitist and arrogant, but Tainter says as much too: "This audience is great, but you're self-selected. Go to WalMart and see how many people are talking about this. I shop at Walmart too, but just ask people." And I'm starting to have an opinion: I suspect that humanity is a value. Values are not proved but enforced by playing Chicken: those who think they are right squawk the loudest. Therefore, despite only a tiny minority thinking about these issues, none-the-less this minority has strong convictions: strong enough to bluff down an adversary many times larger, or as it were more numerous. Thus, good prevails over wicked.

And pardon me if this is not polite to say, but I almost think that half the problem of wretchedness and poverty and inequality is that the masses of people actually believe that they are inferior, believe they deserve poor treatment and are not entitled to respect or owed anything. Not good enough.

i am experiencing that there is no we.

consequently, all logic runs into absurdities, but those have a graver impact in certain already existing conditions than in others.

"not good enough": a disintegrating face running into a symbolic bear on another retreat.

a poorly designed sky showing suspicious eyes and remarkably distinguishable mouths with teeth. whose?
in the case of non-recognition, it's a frightening greeting card from non-friendly entities, or a projection of one's one beliefs, locally limited?
limited as all the re-structured, re-fashioned, re-made, re-done clones of previous archetypes?

the new day allows a fresh interpretation: apparently intimidation never gets enough venting.

Loop & imp-pulse,

"And pardon me if this is not polite to say, but I almost think that half the problem of wretchedness and poverty and inequality is that the masses of people actually believe that they are inferior, believe they deserve poor treatment and are not entitled to respect or owed anything. Not good enough."

"When I behold the human race/How I'd like to smack its silly face" - Pope.

Philosophy is a handy place for being impolite! An intellectual fart-freely zone? I puff my pipe non-PC fashion.

Might I suggest, the situation is more a complex barn-dance than a static tableau? People on one level of awareness know they are as good as anyone else. On another level, they collude in submitting to the malignant strokes of our psychopath rulers. They defend their brainless & gutless collusion by pretending that they submit to oppression by their own free will.

On the other hand, the masses who enthusiastically participate in their own debasement do show real courage, tenacity, & enterprize. Eg., colonial troops served the British Empire magnificently in WWII, & Nazi Germany had many devoted Jewish officers & servants - tragically, they were first & foremost, patriotic Germans.

Dreyfuss was a militarist & hard French nationalist.

Not simple, is it? BP

p.s. no one uses the word 'divestment' anymore.... it was inseparable from 'privatization' .....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divestment

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/231360-Collapsing-Financials

This Max Keiser vid is correct. We are fast approaching the financial holocaust. I think Gerald Celente is one of the few who really grasps what is happening - a slo-mo horror. If you can, stock up a cabin in the woods with plenty of long-life food, gun, ammunition, fishing rod, & medical supplies.

I very sincerely pray they will not be needed. But Celente is historically correct, absolutely: when the bankers screw up this severely, they start large-scale wars. And as I have written before, WMDs of unprecedented killing power are now waiting in the world's arsenals.

If we don't cross posts again, good luck & God bless. BP

quote bamberpanda :If we don't cross posts again, good luck & God bless. BP



Thank you panda ...and the same to you ..best wishes from brian

\!!

resignation not accepted: imp, trotz kopf

QUOTE IMP-PULSE :resignation not accepted: imp, trotz kopf

That is for GOD to decide not a woman with an EGO problem

quote impulse ;precisely: would you recommend prayer for or against ego problems? ..

you also need help with your blushing and continual weeping , you getting yopurself into quite a state lately imp-pulse ......

quote impulse :was ich nicht weiß, macht mich nicht heiß.

wenn in rom tun sie, wie die romer tun , und wenn uber ein englisches brett sprechen sie englisch

http://www.gmfus.org/cs/experts/expert_profile

well, that's english-spoken, but a spooky experience in tow

http://kafkaesquemetamorphosis.blogspot.com/

imp-pulse,

I am deeply suspicious of all this nationalistic chat about Asia, Europe & America. The gurus who talk about 'the rise of Asia' also assure us that we now live in a global economy. If so, who funded the 'Chinese miracle', if not the West-based global banks? How much is 'communist' China run by Rothschilds et al?

There is a great, silent gap in the mass media about where the tsunami of capital came from in the 1980s. This speaks volumes! Poke into the murk anywhere, anytime, & your stick will meet Big R. Rothschilds are not merely a bank, they are a dynasty with centuries-old skills in diplomatic & political powerbending at the highest level.

I sense the House of Rothschild behind Asia's 'rise'. The macro strategy is to use it economically, in order to destroy utterly the foremost democracy in the world - America. This has been the key Rothschild aim since the American Revolution.

But I doubt Big R's psychopaths have rigorously thought thru to the consequences. It will initiate an ustoppable avalanche, a cataclysmic economic collapse that will ruin East & West equally. WWIII is almost guaranteed to break out. In this case, the nukes, fallout or bio-weapons will start to fall round Wall Street & The City of London, wiping out beggars & Rothschild mandarins impartially.

Have these cunning rats considered this? I fear they have not. Those who hate democracy only hear their own triumphalist cries of omnipotence; becoz vox populi, vox dei. BP

\!!

read while you can



the young solist fighters do the job, unwittingly. uncanny: cool and rationally calculating.




have no fears: in court it's your peers, imho



http://spinnernews.com/nach-der-wahl-in-berlin-halbe-firma-sitzt-fur-piraten-partei-im-parlament/

look here: that's what the imf experiences....

http://economicsnewspaper.com/policy/german/world-economic-outlook-imf-sees-black-for-the-world-economy-69870.html

imp-pulse,

yes, the people at the top know their system is collapsing. No capitalist economy has ever survived w/out growth. That is why our top people have abandoned it, & now produce little, & just steal from taxpayers - they are corporatists, a kleptocracy.

Most people are oblivious. We are sleep-walking into utter disaster. There will be an awful lot of casualties. BP

quote bamber panda :We are sleep-walking into utter disaster.


thats right panda but there are a few people who can see whats happening , hence the increasing videos on the net highlighting the problems .

brian1939,

agreed: we only march to mass extermination if we collude in ignorance & evil. We have free choice. How that responsibility frightens the sheep amongst us!

(Part 1) Indigenous Native American Prophecy (Elders Speak part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7cylfQtkDg&feature=related

Lakota Voices - Arlette Loud Hawk: Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JjTsfbaCyY

BP

\!!

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/12/30/population-is-the-world-ready-for-7-billion/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/14/population-explosion-seven-billion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Breadbasket
for dis-engaged / unemployed story-tellers

what belongs to whom or who can still access which part of nature?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

eat my flesh, drink my blood? something gone awry with eschatology?
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eschatology

quote from imp-pulses link: Some time late in 2011—at least according to the people-crunchers at the U.N. Population Reference Bureau—humanity will reach a new demographic milestone with the birth of the 7th billion living person. (As a measure of just how fast global population is growing, the 6th billionth living person—Bosnian Adnan Nevic—is only 11.) You can expect the event to be marked by the usual Malthusian worries—can the planet Earth really support 7 billion people, especially with the population expected to top 9 billion by mid-century? With some 1.5 billion people already living on less than $1.25 a day, nearly 1 billion people hungry and the natural world already heavily damaged, are we on the path to destruction?



quote " are we on the path to desruction ?" ..........YES we are !

imp-pulse & Brian,

IMHO, we are at a confluence of several termination-type tendencies; economic, demographic, ecological & even epistemological. So there seems to be an underlying singular cause, yes? If so, that is ethical/moral - the way we see & treat one-another, which I approach as a practical matter of democracy. If we get the arrangements for true grassroots democracy right, the rest of the problems are soluble.

Of course, not automatically, becoz people may still choose the wrong things. But there is no a priori safeguard against this, since w/out free choice, there is neither democracy nor morality.

Many people shrug & assume a handful of humans will survive the final collapse. But that is an assumption only, I'm afraid. BP

BP:

gadgetry and wizardry are concepts driving each one first into ruthless competition, and sooner or later into systemic bankruptcy.

were our experiences as wonderful as our flights from there into "idealizing" their justification?

imp-pulse,

'wizardry & gadgetry' began with banging two rocks together. We can't blame progress. It's what we do with it. BP