Why aren't we fixing it?

The reality of the damage we are inflicting on the rest of life, each other and the planet itself is becoming more obvious, to more people, every day. Yet despite the best efforts of those who have awakened to the unfolding calamity, nothing seems to be making much difference. Why is it proving so difficult to correct our mistakes and unwind our "progress"?

As I'm saying in various places now, whether one looks just at the level of human social institutions or continues on to look at evolutionary psychology or even thermodynamics as I have tried to do, the answer seems to be the same. The positive feedback loops that drive human growth appear to have a built-in ratchet effect that keeps them from unwinding.

Whether we call it a Progress Trap, a Vicious Circle Principle, Infrastructural Determinism, a survival instinct, thermodynamic dissipation or Manifest Destiny is immaterial. They all simply speak to different appearances of the same phenomenon: irreversibility. There is a good reason nature has made this one-way ratchet so hard to defeat. Without it, we would have been knocked out of the game by competitors, and would not be here today - for better and/or worse.

Individuals can sometimes defeat this ratchet and roll back their own personal progress, but as far as I can tell, groups cannot. What's worse is that the more people there are in a social group, the more tightly the ratchet binds us to the wheel of growth. If we look carefully, we can see its effects in our communities and especially in our nations. When the group consists of 7.3 billion people, all linked through modern communication into Marshall McLuhan's "global village", its effect is virtually inescapable, except for a very small number of individuals. Ironically, even those lucky escapees still remain beholden to some small degree to the bitter fruits of modern progress. Try going off-grid without an axe, for example.

I know a lot of people don't agree with me on this. I hope they are proven right, and I am ultimately shown to be a just a bitter old cynic, rather than the realist I'm afraid I am.