Environment & Energy
In reply to the discussion: Stewart Brand: Why Environmentalists Must Accept Nuclear [View all]GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)As long as energy is available and affordable to somebody, if it's not being used, the system is not maximizing power intake and will adapt to correct that situation.
The system adapts to organize the delivery of maximum energy and other resources to keep the machine running and growing. And "keeping the machine running and growing" is the inherent structural goal of every complex adaptive system. Everything else takes second place.
The corporatizing of culture, the use of unappetizing technologies, and the spread of waste products of all kinds was inevitable. It was not done by deliberately malignant human control, but by inexorable system pressures. Those pressures are the true source of global corporatization and the enabling Shock Doctrine/Security State philosophies that have sprung up to protect it, along with the complete cultural disregard for the safety of human beings in the process of producing resources and energy. Social justice and equity don't even register unless they make the system more able to fulfill its mandate of power growth.
This is the logical extension of Dan Quinn's totalitarian agriculture and putting locks and guards on the granaries e,000 years ago. That's why The System is so damned resilient and hard to take down, or even alter. this is also what what Marvin Harris' "Primacy of Infrastructure" principle says in a different way. The Man is not running the show, as much as he tells us he is. Man is not running things, as much as we tell ourselves we are. The source of this river of discontent is buried in the organization and structure of living matter and complex systems.
This idea is extremely distasteful to those of us who have been raised in a progressive, left-wing, humanist context. I was raised like that, and this realization was devastating. Nevertheless, I'm convinced of its truth.