Biologist E. O. Wilson once wrote that ‘We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.’ He was eloquently juxtaposing our individual limitations against the astonishing achievements of humanity.
In Part I we discovered who we are and how we got here; the four laws of life that describe all life on this planet and the theory of everyone that describes our species. Thus armed, we can begin to understand ourselves and our societies, our intelligence and our creativity, our capacity for both cooperation and cruelty.
Rousseau believed human nature was naturally good but corrupted by society.
Hobbes believed human nature was nasty and brutish but civilized by society.
Hobbes was wrong. So was Rousseau.
They weren't even asking the right question, because we now know that there is no single human nature. Human nature is deeply nurtured. How we nurture comes from our nature. We now know that the nature versus nurture debate for human behavior makes about as much sense as a right leg versus left leg debate for human walking. We have a dual inheritance, inextricably entwined.
Human nature has co-evolved with our norms and institutions, all of which has been molded by the laws of cooperation, energy, and innovation. From this vantage point we can marvel at the space of the possible created by the energy we've unlocked and put to work for us. Our productivity increases when we marshal vast energy budgets to do our bidding. Fossil fuels astronomically expanded our energy budgets. Excess energy fueled the evolution of technologies and social innovations in efficiency and cooperation. The future of our energy budget will determine what comes next. Where we're going is not inevitable. It is a choice. Who will make it and how?
Armed with our theory of everyone and the laws of life, we can bring new solutions to old problems. We can understand ultimate, systems-level causes, look ahead to the challenges coming our way, and apply the science to create new solutions. We will go as far as the science can take us and then go a little further.
It has been ten generations since the Industrial Revolution. Up until now, our energy ceiling has been in the rising phase of growth and abundance. That ceiling has been so high for so long that almost every generation alive today has lived through a period where it has felt limitless. Nobody alive today can remember the before times. The data is too abstract to truly appreciate.
Instead, our economic systems, invented after the Industrial Revolution, are focused almost entirely on innovations in efficiency – how to do more with less energy – the law of innovation – ignoring the total available amount of excess energy – the law of energy. But our energy ceiling is now falling. The era of growth is over and we are living through a Great Stagnation in productivity as we run out of ways to improve efficiency through non-energy-expanding technological innovations.
The energy ceiling matters far more than the technological innovations in efficiency.
There is a limit to how much more efficient we can make the heating system of a house. At the end of the day, some minimum amount of joules of energy are needed to keep it warm.
There is a limit to the efficiency of our ability to hunt with better weapons or better techniques. At the end of the day, the calorie returns are a function of the animals we kill.
There is a limit to the efficiency that new technologies can squeeze out of a given amount of energy. Ford's assembly lines created more efficient factories, but they still required a minimum amount of joules of energy to operate.
Energy has been abundant for so long that we have taken it for granted while our larger, smarter collective brains innovated greater efficiencies that did more with less.
Now, as the energy ceiling falls and innovations in efficiency hit limits, the space of the possible shrinks. The squeeze is cracking and even breaking societies. This coming century will determine if we support and then raise the ceiling, clean up our planet, and set the stage to become a spacefaring galactic civilization, or if the ceiling crashes down on a failed species unwilling to look up and now forever stuck on a chaotic, climate-changed Earth being slowly depleted of the highly available, energy-dense high EROI sources needed to spring forward to the next energy level.
As EROI falls and high-density energy sources become scarcer, we are scarring our planet as we dig, frack, and scramble over the little that's left. Climate change has created new challenges over limited resources as we cycle through droughts and floods and sudden shocks to essential supplies. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, droughts in Syria turned previously fertile land into desert. Failing crops led people to move from farms to cities. Insufficient resources and the sudden influx of migrants led to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction led to protests. Protests turned into civil war. It wasn't long before the troubles spilled beyond Syria's borders into Europe. Like hosts who hadn't bought enough groceries for unexpected guests, Europe scrambled to accommodate the refugees. Not everyone was pleased at the influx of newcomers, leading to a rise in prominence and power of right-wing populists across the continent. At the height of the crisis, in 2015, 45% of Brits said that the refugee crisis on the Continent made them more likely to vote Leave in the Brexit referendum. Xenophobia was a strong predictor of voting Leave. The crisis was not the cause of Brexit, but it may have been enough to tip the scales. In 2016, Britain voted to break away, declaring itself an economic and political island. What happened in Syria was not unique.
In Africa, ‘unprecedented’ and ‘record high’ have become the climate catchphrases of the new century. Both insufficient rain and flooded rivers create food insecurity, increasing violent conflict over water, pasture, and land between farmers and herders and different regions. The instability and disasters have led to millions of migrants spilling over into countries like Uganda and Sudan. It was easier for the West to ignore what wasn't on its doorstep. We are not living through temporary bad times; these are all signs of the challenges ahead.
It is only thanks to the sacrifice of life long dead, fossilized as fuel, that we are able to live in a technological wonderland today. In just a few centuries we burned through these carbon batteries that had taken millions of years to charge, becoming more globalized and more diverse. That globalization led to greater efficiency through specialization, but also centralized production. Centralized production has made our supply chains less resilient and flexible. Take for example the resources and technologies at the heart of our information economy.
Taiwan alone manufactures nine out of every ten computer chips powering the world's cellphones, laptops, and Web servers. Lithium is critical to battery technologies among other electronic items essential to modern life. Almost half the world's lithium reserves are in Chile. Australia and China have a further 40%. This kind of dependency is found in just about every essential mined metal that is needed to power our solar panels and build our technologies. China alone manufactures seven out of every ten solar panels. A further 20% are manufactured in East and South East Asia.
We are not prepared for shocks to these suppliers.
The cultural diversity of our societies empowers innovation but also creates division. The world over, we have less trust in our institutions and in each other. Technological efficiencies have allowed a small few to accrue vast wealth. In turn, wealth inequalities and power imbalances are biasing our political decision-making. When that power is passed on from the original investor or innovator to their heirs, it leads to inefficient allocation over our remaining still-vast energy budget. And so the allocation of our energy budget has become less efficient with each generation.
If these social challenges weren't enough, our more diverse, unequal, and divided societies are tasked with dealing with sudden shocks, from droughts and dry summers drying up hydropower in Brazil and Europe to gas shortages leading to lower food supplies and to a global pandemic and all its consequences. And thanks to social media, we're creating new tribes based on common interests, all of whom are more aware of each other.
Our public spaces, both real world and online, are battlegrounds. Here cultural-groups promote ideas and visions for the world, all vying for dominance and in turn creating cooperation at different scales and competing over energy by the law of evolution. Some of these ideas are a reason for hope. Others are a reason for despair. As an author, my hope is that, having read this book, you will find the messy, confusing, and chaotic human world a little less messy, confusing, and chaotic. That you will feel better equipped to push for better decisions moving forward. Because the decisions we make today will determine what our future will look like and what remaining choices are available to us. Which of those futures is our future?
In some futures we live in perpetual zero-sum conflict, forever trapped in the Malthusian dystopia of the past as EROI continues to decline, leaving us without sufficiently large and accessible energy sources to cooperate at the current large scale of diverse societies of strangers. In these futures we are polarized into ever smaller cooperative groups that circumstances force us to pick, and become entrenched in our positions, unable to think clearly or in ways that cross ideological lines. In this future we fight with one another in an ever-escalating conflict. As you may have noticed, we are at the beginning of this shift.
Collapse doesn't happen overnight.
Collapse is a gradual decline.
Our bills rise as energy becomes more expensive. As energy becomes more expensive so too does food, transport, and everything else. For the first time, children have harsher lives than their parents, and we are seeing the beginning of more people sliding down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from the creative pursuit of our full potential down to basic concerns over food, water, and housing. No amount of sustainability or cutting back can prevent the inevitable. The progress we have made in reducing poverty over centuries is being reversed in a matter of years, and our higher ideals are becoming lost as we struggle with forces beyond our control. Liberal democracy, freedom of speech, and pluralism become the ideals of a more abundant age and are seen as irrelevant to the realities of ever-present scarcity.
In this future inequality continues to rise and innovation continues to stagnate, immune to all government attempts at stimulation. We cooperate in smaller tribes of those we trust, against those we do not trust. And like the Tasmanians, we go backwards and lose the advances in technology and intelligence of our own ancestors. We begin violently tearing ourselves and each other apart over the limited energy and resources left on our planet, no longer possessing sufficient energy and cooperation to unlock the next energy level.
We are currently heading down this cold, dark path, but it is not inevitable.
In alternative brighter futures, we use our theory of everyone to scale democracy to deal with large and diverse populations of competing cultural-groups. In these futures, concerns around inequality dissolve as each of us has the opportunity to compete in a fair competition for wealth and ultimately for control over how we allocate our vast energy budget. A competition that is not rigged by the arbitrary circumstances of our birth. We reinvigorate innovation through a creative explosion and redirect all our current efforts at energy control toward bets that rocket us to permanent fusion-fueled abundance. In this future we head to the stars and, if we're lucky, become the first generation of a civilization that spans the galaxy.