In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore uses the analogy of a frog placed in tepid water whose temperature is slowly raised to illustrate our disregard for the warning signs of a changing climate. It's a clever analogy that's almost certainly wrong. Animals have powerful instincts to survive in precarious and danger-filled environments. As soon as the frog becomes uncomfortable, it will leap out. In the same way, humans are not oblivious to the changes happening around them. We can feel in our bones that something is wrong. Like the frog, we are trying to make the leap.
The problem is not that we don't notice the warning signs, it's that we don't know what to do about it. As excess energy falls, life becomes harder. As the challenges posed by climate change, such as large influxes of people, weaken our institutions, our societies fracture and it becomes difficult for us to realize the role of energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution, and how together these laws have created us and our civilizations. The resulting anger and frustration can make our societies ungovernable, and we may lose faith in the fairness of our systems and in each other.
As energy return on investment and energy availability continue to fall to precipitous levels, our civilizations are quickly losing the excess energy necessary to overcome the danger we find ourselves in. This may sound dire, but history has shown us that every major civilization has been crushed by a falling energy ceiling – as their space of the possible shrank, they were defeated by forces both outside and within. At the peak of the Roman Empire, it would have been hard to imagine that it would fall. At the height of the British Empire it would have been hard to imagine Britain's current state. Today's America is starting to show signs of the same future.
Excess energy has plummeted. Remember:
A theory of everyone reveals the true story of Homo sapiens. We have a genetic inheritance but also a cultural inheritance, and now a machine inheritance. Our intelligence is not just a product of the hardware of our big brain but also the socially acquired software that shapes it. To understand human intelligence we must understand social learning and cooperation, and how these laws work together to drive innovation and progress. And today, we have to understand how that psychology and sociality play out online in a world coinhabited by AI agents who may be smarter than we are.
The story of us that is emerging shows the fundamental drivers of our existence, how we organize ourselves on a micro level and a macro level. But there are some dark twists.
We have cooperated in the pursuit of great achievements – building an Internet and walking on the Moon.
We have cooperated toward great atrocities – slavery and genocides.
Innovation through our collective brains and enormous energy budgets has increased our capabilities for both creation and destruction.
Our story has always played out against the backdrop of the laws of life. New social and technological breakthroughs have been deployed against those who don't yet have the advantage. Over time, aggrieved groups learn, share, and grow, sometimes becoming aggressors themselves. The bright sparks that lead to progress are not specific people but all of us, sharing ideas that eventually meet in someone's head: our collective brains.
Those bright sparks are powered by energy.
The quest for energy is at the heart of the laws of life and the theory of everyone. It is the ultimate driver of all we do and the ultimate constraint on what we can achieve. Its scarcity, relative scarcity, or even perceived scarcity drive competition and conflict; its availability allows for compassion and cooperation. Each energy level gives us more power to create and more power to destroy. Energy is what powers our technologies, our economies, and everything we do. No matter how fancy and powerful our technologies may be, they're useless if we can't charge them. Other resources, such as water, may be scarce, but they are fundamentally different to energy. With abundant energy you can get water, but abundant water alone isn't enough to get energy.
As energy scientist and energy return on investment (EROI) pioneer Charles Hall often points out, the correlation between GDP growth in real terms and ability to consume oil is 0.7 (remember a maximum correlation is 1). The same correlation exists for the size of firms in a country and for energy per person. That means that 50% of economic growth, the size of companies, and your wealth can be attributed to the law of energy. The other 50% can be attributed to the laws of innovation and cooperation increasing efficiency. Given this close link between our economies and energy, it should be no surprise that before every recession in the past fifty years, including the 2008 financial crisis, the price of oil shot up. It should be no surprise that when the average capacity of US power plants fell in the 1970s, so too did economic growth.
The energy sector currently accounts for 5% of the economy, which means that 5% of our collective efforts are devoted to producing and managing energy. This leaves 95% of our resources free to be allocated toward other endeavors. However, as the EROI or energy abundance decreases, the 95% excess energy shrinks. This means that we have to dedicate more effort toward extracting energy than enjoying it. As I write, the early signs of this energy crisis are already becoming apparent.
At a societal level, it means an increase in the energy sector relative to the rest of the economy. It means higher energy prices.
At a household level this directly translates to more money spent on gas, heating, and electricity, and less money for luxuries, holidays, and fun. In other words, life becomes harder.
Everything runs on excess energy. The more excess energy we have, the better life becomes.
Watching world events sometimes leaves us with a sense of impotence. What can I do about all the world's ills? But there is reason for hope. Our everyday experience tells us that what we see online, hear on the radio, or read in newspapers is not representative of most people. In real life, people don't really hate each other that much. On most topics, most people are ambivalent, apathetic to all but a handful of issues that directly affect their everyday existence, waiting instead for what is required to reinforce their group identity. Most people are kind and cooperative at a scale that would surprise our ancestors. Before those norms change, we must harness them to reunite humanity, develop models of governance for the twenty-first century, shatter the glass ceiling, trigger a creative explosion, improve the Internet, and become brighter. This will require a shift in our thinking and a willingness to challenge the status quo. It won't be easy, but it's a challenge worth taking on, because by setting ourselves on this brighter path we will have enough energy to overcome the challenges we face. With abundant energy, growth can be clean. Instead of destroying our planet, we can use that abundant energy to clean up the climate mess.
If there is a final message in this book, it is this. We don't have to accept the world as it is. Change is possible. The world was made by people no smarter than us, and thanks to rising IQ scores, probably less smart. A committed, well-connected, and well-resourced group powered by an easily understood idea is capable of moving us to a different equilibrium.
The Quakers, other Christian abolitionists, and the enslaved sparked the end of slavery – once commonplace throughout the world – which is now an unfathomable, unthinkable manifestation of unfairness and inequality. The Fabians and other socialists sparked a change that led to Britain transitioning from the world's largest empire to a smaller social-security welfare state. The Suffragettes sparked the expansion of women's rights and gender equality. Civil Rights activists challenged the legal inequality of Blacks and Whites in the United States. Rights have continued to expand to more and more areas of life in what might best be described as runaway cultural evolution: once a norm of equality is established, consistency and status for greater equality can drive attempts to expand the moral circle.
Norms, whether evidence-based or not, can be formalized in legal codes and constitutions. These can then be coordinated and called on for consistency. The belief that ‘all are created equal’ is one such norm, formalized in the American Constitution. In the United States, it has triggered cultural run-away toward ever-greater equality.
These were the words used in Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg address to inspire a reunification in the midst of a civil war:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
These were the words used by women's rights activists in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments:
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.
These were the words used by Martin Luther King, Jr in 1963, when he called for America to live out its ideals:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
Just as we ended mass slavery and lifted up women and minorities of all kinds in an ever-expanding circle of who matters, we can also tie our societies back together. We can shatter the glass ceiling of systematic, multigenerational inequality for a fairer world; we can evolve better governance structures; we can trigger a creative explosion; and we can become our best selves, a beacon for future generations.
I hope this book has provided tools for how to advocate and what to advocate for. Not proximate solutions that patch problems and polarize groups, creating more problems, but instead permanent systematic ultimate solutions. I hope I have helped you realize that our problems and their answers don't lie with any particular leader, any particular person, or any particular group. They require us to consider the rules of the system and what they inevitably lead to. Often, we cannot design the right rules, but we can create conditions for the right rules to evolve.
We have laws of life and a theory of everyone. We have a periodic table for people.
I hope you now know the answer to what Wallace's older fish asked. I hope you can now see the water. We have the power to shape our societies, to influence our systems, and to determine our future. We can crack the next energy revolution to create a world that is not just sustainable, but thriving; not just efficient, but just; not just innovative, but transformative.
The laws of life will go ever onwards. If we make the right decisions, so too will we.