(apo)calyptic voices | 1. Intelligence and Integrity
This series looks at the distortion of collapse discourse - at the acknowledgement that things are bad and could get worse, but without a grasp on what I would consider true collapsology. These messengers lack a solid appreciation of “inter-realm dynamics and what they imply for the Werld” (the predestined fate of the industrial-digital system and potentially even agriculture).
The roots of the word “apocalypse” are ἀπό (“off,” “away from”) and καλύπτω (“to cover,” “to conceal”). It’s an unveiling. But I notice many individuals who warn of an apocalypse yet view the past, present and future through an obscuring veil.
I. Intelligence
When I imagine a creature whom I would describe as intelligent, they’re one who tends to:
gather information - and maybe I should specify here, valuable information
integrate that information into their decision-making and behavior
A creature who gathers mainly the wrong kind of information or who doesn’t allow that information to influence their actions is one who walks off a cliff or into a predator’s mouth.
Every day, you wake up and -consciously or not, and based on information that may or may not be accurate- decide how to spend your day, your week, and the next several years.
Simply put:
I feel hunger and I’m fairly confident that my fridge contains food and I expect that eating the food will quell my hunger, so I walk to the fridge …
Our culture says that a career is a reliable way to meet your essential needs and find personal fulfillment and earn respect from others, so you pursue one that you have reason to believe will check all three boxes or at least the first.
When I speak with people, I’m keenly aware of when they make statements that assume certain intelligence (information) about the future - For example, whenever someone replies to a statement like “I’ll be due for a hip replacement in 30 years” with “Oh, by then, the technology will have improved!” … Will it?
II. Broad questions for intelligence about the future
When I’ve sought to learn about what I should expect in the coming years and decades (and when any creature tries to anticipate), the investigation comes down to these questions:
DESCRIPTION: What’s happening? What underlying forces are driving these trends? … This has the potential to be the least subjective.
PREDICTION: What do those forces mean for future circumstances? … This could get more subjective.
PRESCRIPTION: What should I be doing? … This must be subjective, because part of it is always based on what you care about. When a doctor says “You should quit smoking”, she’s taking something that’s true (“If you quit smoking, you’ll probably have fewer health problems”) and combining it with the assumption that you want to leverage the cause-effect relationship. Maybe you don’t.
III. Specific questions
This is where I get to the “integrity” part of the title.
We understand, for example, that if a woman wants to know whether she’s going to have a baby, the better ways to look into it are:
Did I have PIV sex? And were both parties fertile? Or - Did I get IVF?
When was my last period?
Urine test
Ultrasound
She could ask other questions, but you can see how these would be silly:
When I’ve felt nauseous before, how did it turn out?
When I’ve gained weight before, what caused it?
What do storks’ recent flight patterns look like? (There’s a high correlation between storks and human births, but as How to Lie with Statistics points out: Storks like to nest at the tops of chimneys, and larger houses tend to have both more chimneys and more children.)
Does my house have a spare bedroom?
Am I friendly? Do I deserve to be pregnant? (You’ll see the relevance in a future post…)
These might give her a correct answer, but it would be due more to luck or to coincidence than to true understanding.
IV. Step Zero: Exposure
Responsible inquiry means first surveying all the possible questions you could ask and determining which are the most relevant to hone in on.
For the potentially-pregnant woman wondering about her future, this would lead her to the first set of questions instead of the second.
Then again, if that same woman were on a plane falling from the sky, the even more relevant questions for future-anticipation would be: Are we over water or land? Am I able to get my oxygen mask and vest on? etc.
I think of this concept as “predictive weight”. There’s probably an official term.
I notice that when people catch wind of how much trouble we’re in, they rush immediately to the questions that promise to remedy some aspect of our predicament. If you were looking into these so-called solutions merely for fun and for narrow expertise, their haphazard approach works fine. But it would be unjustified to expect that their prescriptions would deliver the desired big-picture results, without first examining the larger context in which people would be deploying (or trying to deploy) so-called solutions.
V. “Good News”?
As I say at the beginning of my Video #3 - Those who’ve concluded that the Werld is expiring understand fully well that certain small improvements are surfacing, trumpeted by Reasons to be Cheerful and Fix the News and all kinds of misleading headlines and graphs. But when analysts refrain from considering the unpleasant news, they are unfairly assigning a predictive weight of 0 to that whole category of data. An appreciation of “inter-realm dynamics” reveals that those reports don’t change the fact that the physical Technosphere (as well as the Biosphere and Abiosphere) on which many humans rely for essential needs is inevitably deteriorating and running low on juice. The overwhelming trend (so far) is one of ecological devastation and (looking ahead) will be that of industrialism’s and complex civilization’s decline.
Just as in video games, I would say modernity creates a similarly impoverished virtual reality. It’s a make-believe world wherein all the focus is on a narrow set of intended consequences, pretending the far-more-numerous and mounting unintended consequences either don’t exist or can be tamed by the same techniques that concentrate only on intended results.
-Tom Murphy, “Virtual Reality”
Our hypothetical, potentially-pregnant woman may have asked the more-relevant questions instead of the relevant ones. And she may have recently experienced all kinds of positive turnarounds in her life - a commitment to healthier habits, a promotion. But at the intersection of intelligence and integrity, to sense her future, it’s imperative that she tune in to the turbulence and change in cabin pressure.
