Run to Failure: When Self-Interest Cripples Society's Self-Correcting Mechanisms

This is essay #9 in the series The Revolution No One Sees Coming.

NOTE: thank you for your concerns about cyclone Lala sweeping over the Big Island. Today is the primary impact and so far it's a conventional tropical storm--steady rains and gusty winds around 25-30 mph in Hilo. All is well.

This is essay #9 in the series The Revolution No One Sees Coming.

The core problem is that symptoms are being taken as causes, and so the proposed solutions can’t fix a system locked in a self-reinforcing doom loop.

This is the driving force of The Revolution No One Sees Coming: thinking symptoms are the cause generates illusory “problems” and “solutions” that are incapable of solving the real problem because that remains unrecognized.

In our technocratic era, problems and solutions are framed by science, economics, technology, political ideologies and the technocratic metrics that suit all four: it’s not moral rot / cultural decay, it’s energy, or ideology, or economic policies, or going off the gold standard, or a decline in productivity--all dynamics that fit the “scientism” requirement of being measurable and therefore analyzable by math.

Here are some of the symptoms that are commonly identified as the core cause of our problems, with the obvious “solution” being to re-establish the conditions that predated the “problem,” on the belief that returning to previous conditions will automatically fix what’s broken.

CHS NOTE: the Revolution No One Sees Coming will not just be a series of external events, it will be personal, as each of us will face situations we didn’t choose whose novelty and scale may exceed our previous experience. History is full of changes no one thought possible a few years earlier. No one else is writing about it like I am, so a subscription--which costs the same as a few sushi--is a unique value. Thank you for supporting my work.