Collaborators
Mitch Weisburgh has requested collaborators to join the launch team for his new book titled ‘Conflict and Collaboration’. As a volunteer, I had access to a pre-release of the book. In the first chapter he explains that the limbic system in the human brain offers five different knee-jerk reactions when we find ourselves in danger. The first three will be a familiar list to most people: freeze, fight, and flight. It was news to me that there are two more options: fluency, and follow. This article suggests that fluency and follow explain why we are unable to respond sensibly to the big existential threats of our time.
Fluency
The ‘fluency’ option refers to well honed skills and behaviours that we have learned and developed over years. When we detect danger, if our limbic system decides that one of these familiar behaviours will serve to counteract the perceived danger we shall set to and apply our critical thinking to achieve the usual outcomes that relate to that previously honed model of behaviour. Unfortunately, if the model that has been chosen by the limbic system is not suited to resolving the danger, we start putting a lot of energy into a strategy that does not alleviate the danger.
In these cases the limbic system has bypassed our critical thinking at the outset, by choosing a tried and tested model, without asking whether that model is appropriate. In this way our limbic system creates a loophole that traps critical thinking and prevents it from being applied to our most fundamental system models.
‘Fluency’ fails to tackle climate change
Unfortunately, all our strategies to tackle climate change are deeply entrenched in the socio-economic model that delivered climate change in the first place. I call this model ‘growth economics’, because it is the growth aspect of our economy that pushed us over the carrying capacity of Earth about a century ago.
Many people in the over-developed Northern hemisphere view our recent history with pride. Recent decades show a massive rise in global GDP, global population, and global consumption. Most people see all this development as terrific progress. They are not looking at the massive amount of damage to our environment which is involved in development, of which climate change is just one symptom. The UN Sustainable Development Goals urge under-developed countries to follow this pattern of development. The UN SDGs are worthy objectives that are framed within the flawed assumption that growth economics is sustainable. They need refining. I suggest renaming them as Sustainable Degrowth Goals, and then we can rework the detailed advice.
The I=PAT insights from Environmental sciences in the 1970s failed to avert the massive limbic response of growth economics from the developed world. These insights combined with the data on ecological overshoot to warn us that growth economics was past its sell-by-date. From the fiduciary perspective we can easily argue that growth economics is illegal. All these scientific arguments struggle to get passed the dominant limbic system response in our business and political leaders which wants to apply the techniques from growth economics.
Nowadays, as the scientific evidence continues to rack up, those who are less able to suppress their limbic system are looking for ways to silence the scientists and anyone challenging the economic model. For example: Trump Classifies “Anti-Capitalism” as a Political Pre-Crime. This article reveals that ‘Donald Trump’s new security directive labels anti-capitalist beliefs as a predictor of political violence. The irony: left-wing structural analysis actually pushes people away from lone-wolf attacks and toward mass organizing for change.’
The net-zero transition is packaged as a way to grow the economy. The myth of Carbon Capture and Storage is kept alive by all those invested in the fossil-fuel industry. All our clever minds have been beavering away using an underlying economic strategy that will only make our predicament worse.
‘Fluency’ fails to tackle overpopulation
Very simple calculations involving footprint per capita and the surface area of Earth inform us that we are in a chronic state of overpopulation and overconsumption. We would need to shrink the global economy and population by about 75% to return within the carrying-capacity of Earth. Data on insect decline goes back 100 years and tracks the start of the mass extinction event that we are causing.
Our limbic system is pre-wired to respond to the threat of extinction with greater procreation. This is a most unhelpful response in a global ecosystems collapse that is likely to cause widespread food insecurity. Minimal birth rates will minimise suffering in our current scenario.
‘Follow’ stops challenges to entrenched systems
The limbic response of ‘follow’ adds to the problems caused by ‘fluency’. We tend to look to our experts to guide us forwards. This episode of Barry’s Economics is a masterclass in revealing entrenched thinking in a well-meaning debate. At 8:30 minutes Barry shows a clip where Gary Stevenson retells an interaction with a Professor of economics at Oxford University. Confronted with evidence that he is wrong, the Professor is completely unfazed and disinclined to alter his perspective. This is a classic example of limbic system override. Rory Stewart’s response reveals his limbic system is categorising Gary’s distress as ‘class rage’ rather than ‘survival distress’.
Overcoming the Limbic Response
The challenges to Capitalism and growth economics have been emerging for decades. They are now getting close to the academic mainstream, with research papers like these:
Kate Raworth has just published a second edition of Doughnut Economics which incorporates the need for Degrowth into the Doughnut concept. This is a very helpful development. The new addition reference this paper: Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance | Nature
It will hopefully not be long before business folk and politicians will look at these developments and start to overcome their embedded limbic response that is trying to persist with the old model of growth economics.
Many thanks to Mitch Weisburgh for all the fantastic insights in his upcoming book ‘Conflict and Collaboration’. Since writing this article, Mitch informed me that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pointed out that growth economics was a paradigm that had outlived its usefulness and has become a limbic habit. Group pressure keeps us from questioning it, whilst our leaders’ livelihoods depend on the largess of the people who most benefit from it. Csikszentmihalyi died in 2020, so clearly, even when this problem is pointed out to us, a huge and united effort is required to overcome the iteration of habit.
Progress with Conceptual Model of the Emerging Paradigm Shift
Since writing this article I have made some progress with drawing some conceptual models representing the old paradigms, and the new paradigms that are attempting to emerge. Many people are still stuck in the patriarchal and pronatalist mindset. It seems counter-intuitive that minimal birth-rate and consumption per capita is the safest route towards the survival of the human race. However we are in now escalating ecosystems collapse, and global cooperation towards contracting the global economy and population size is the wisest strategy to maximise mitigation.
