It’s no wonder that fewer than half of citizens can be bothered to vote
- for: broken system, voting, low turnout, low voter turnout, together alone
- adjacency
- low turnout
- low voter turnout
- alienation
- anonymous neighbourhoods
- anonymous community
It’s no wonder that fewer than half of citizens can be bothered to vote
as the issues have become so complex and plentiful that no one can hope to be knowledgeable enough to make competent decisions about them. This is the point at which highly complex societies start to collapse of their own weight.
It probably isn’t even a stretch to suggest that herds and flocks of many other animals use a form of direct democracy in making their decisions. Again despite the myths, “alphas” do not make decisions for others, “leadership” roles rotate regularly, the “law of two (or four) feet” tests the group’s readiness for consensus, and principles such as the “first follower” enable wild creatures to reach a decision in their group’s best collective interest. Dissenters and unpersuaded group members are free to go off and look for another group, except at critical times (such as breeding season, or when under attack), when all members of the group instinctively pitch in to share the extra burden or workload, or help work through the crisis or challenge. We’re not so different, or, at least, we weren’t.
story of three Inuit tribe members who get stranded in a blizzard during a hunt
The Tweedledums
The Tweedledees
signs of collapse include
Our findings suggest that the share of US$2020-millionaires in the world population will grow from 0.7% today to 3.3% in 2050, and cause accumulated emissions of 286 Gt CO2. This is equivalent to 72% of the remaining carbon budget, and significantly reduces the chance of stabilizing climate change at 1.5 °C.
According to a new study by tourism professor Stefan Gössling, the millionaires will, within just a few decades, be responsible for almost three quarters of carbon dioxide emissions.
there is a critical tipping threshold of 35% of the population, for plausible distributions of risk/conformity preferences and expectations.
Can policy promote beneficial norm change? The model suggests that effective interventions lower the tipping threshold.
Two factors consistently helped hasten beneficial change in our study.
An interdisciplinary framework for navigating social–climatic tipping points
Climate change can drive social tipping points – for better or for worse
for: social tipping point, social tipping points, leverage point, leverage points, STP, 25% STP threshold
title
We might view human social organization in general in this lens: social organization exists to maximize the extraction of energy from the environment to the group and individual (X), and the efficiency of the conversion of extracted energy into offspring (E). This is identical to the claim that social organization exists to maximize the fitness of the group (Wilson and Sober 1994) and/or the individuals which compose the group (Nowak et al. 2010), given an energetic definition of fitness.
Ricklefs and Wikelski 2002)]. In this context, Pianka (1970) argued that, “…natural selection will usually act to maximize the amounts of matter and energy gathered per unit time.” Brown et al. (1993) likewise offered an energetic definition in which fitness is “reproductive power, or the rate of conversion of energy into offspring.” This reproductive power was taken to be a function of both the rate of assimilation of energy from the environment and the rate of conversion of energy to offspring (but see (Kozlowski 1996)).
In AET, this process results in a species that is prone to niche construction and ecosystem engineering, and the scale of these processes continues to increase as the population rises. This increasing scale coupled with human propensity for niche construction leads to human unsustainability
Thus, we seek to build a conceptual evolutionary model of the human socio-ecological system that is consistent with these insights from agricultural systems but is more evolutionary and more general and incorporates extra-somatic energy, defined as energy that is used by humans but not used in direct human metabolism (Price 1995).
This increasing energy extraction could then, contra Malthus, support an exponentially growing population.
To Gowdy and Krall, the ultra-social nature of human groups allowed for a shift in the primary level of selection from the individual level to the group level. Thus, “With the transition to agriculture the group as an adaptive unit comes to constitute a wholly different gestalt driven by the imperative to produce surplus
Anthroecological theory (AET) hypothesizes that human social and cultural evolution is the ultimate cause of the ecological crises currently damaging earth systems
for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap
Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability
Author: Brian F. Snyder
Abstract
In addition to states of socio-ecological crisis and socio-ecological collapse, human populations have spent much of the remainder of our post-paleolithic history in a state of unsustainability
for: social tipping points, STP, social tipping point, leverage point, Sirkku Juhola
title
abstract
reference
for: social tipping point, social tipping points, leverage point, STP
reference
To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.
The story that they are telling is of a grand transition that occurred about fifty thousand years ago, when the driving force of evolution changed from biology to culture, and the direction changed from diversification to unification of species. The understanding of this story can perhaps help us to deal more wisely with our responsibilities as stewards of our planet.
But it's so essential that we go to this place that our brain gave us a solution. Evolution gave us a solution. And it's possibly one of the most profound perceptual experiences. And it's the experience of awe.
-for: awe, wonder, Deep Humanity, inner transformation, transition, inner/outer transformation, social tipping point, individual tipping point - Awe / wonder (getting in touch with the sacred) is evolutions solution to helping us transition into the unknown - This is in alignment with the essence of the open source Deep Humanity praxis - helping individuals to rediscover the sacred, to transform life back into a living experience of awe and wonder - Deep Humanity's purpose is to rekindle awe so that - we may bring about an individual tipping point, and collectively, - collective tipping point in global society to accelerate the transition out of the polycrisis
...moving from the scared back to the sacred
Everything I'm saying to you right now is literally meaningless. (Laughter) 00:03:11 You're creating the meaning and projecting it onto me. And what's true for objects is true for other people. While you can measure their "what" and their "when," you can never measure their "why." So we color other people. We project a meaning onto them based on our biases and our experience.
Horror films are always shot in the dark, in the forest, at night, in the depths of the sea, the blackness of space. And the reason is because dying was easy during evolution. If you weren't sure that was a predator, it was too late. Your brain evolved to predict. 00:02:42 And if you couldn't predict, you died. And the way your brain predicts is by encoding the bias and assumptions that were useful in the past. But those assumptions just don't stay inside your brain. You project them out into the world. There is no bird there. You're projecting the meaning onto the screen.
What is one of our greatest needs, one of our greatest needs for our brain? And instead of telling you, I want to show you. In fact, I want you to feel it. There's a lot I want you to feel in the next 14 minutes. So, if we could all stand up. 00:00:39 We're all going to conduct a piece of Strauss together. Alright?
when we step into uncertainty, our bodies respond physiologically and mentally.
others have demonstrated, for instance, Professors Haidt and Keltner, have told us that people feel small but connected to the world. And their prosocial behavior increases, because they feel an increased affinity towards others. And we've also shown in this study that people have less need for cognitive control. They're more comfortable with uncertainty without having closure.
we recorded the brain activity of people while they're watching the performance, over 10 performances of "O," which is iconic Cirque performance.
we've actually initiated a pilot study to look to see whether we could use art-induced awe to facilitate toleration. 00:12:55 And the results are actually incredibly positive. We can mitigate against anger and hate through the experience of awe generated by art.
If you and I are in conflict, it's as if we're at the opposite ends of the same line. And my aim is to prove that you're wrong and to shift you towards me. The problem is, you are doing exactly the same.
A suggestion: that awe is not just to be found in the grandeur. Awe is essential
try asking questions that lead the person to question what they believe.
Search out perspectives from multiple sides of an issue.
what are we gonna do with all these boundaries once this is their set right 01:43:58 what I always say that this esps really need to be linked to actors if they are going to have any bearing in real world and to guide the practice so we can do that by cross-scale 01:44:11 translation try to bring down this you know planetary level kind of our boundaries into actors cities and businesses in particular so when we talk about this cross-scale translation what we are talking about is if the boundary 01:44:24 is transgressed then what we are talking about is how do you allocate the responsibilities equal um equitably
Reviewing wood-based solar-driven interfacial evaporators for desalination
Wood-Based Mesoporous Filter Decorated with Silver Nanoparticles for Water Purification
individuals with different worldviews do not want to engage with each other. Such engagement is essential to making progress in our transition toward a more sustainable society.
date
claim
comment
CCS likely has an important role in stopping emissions from some industrial process, particularly cement and possibly steel. But that is very different from using it to support an oil and gas industry that needs to be phased out within 10 to 15 years at the latest, if we are to meet our Paris commitments.
fertiliser, the challenge is more real, but there is still an important and obvious first step – eat less meat. A large part of the world’s agricultural system is dedicated to growing crops and vegetables to feed animals, which we then eat. Reduce the last part of this equation (i.e. eat less meat), and the huge inefficiencies in the system mean far less fertiliser is required.
However, CCS on a powerstation is not going to stop CO2 being released from burning kerosene in an aircraft. The only near-medium term answer for this sector is a rapid, massive and fair cut in aviation use – at least until zero-carbon aircraft have replaced most of the current fleet.
The proposed capture of CO2 is dwarfed by the CO2 emissions from the proposed new oil and gas fields.
This is not to say the technology cannot be made to work at scale, but it is incorrect and risks being misleading to give the impression the technology is tried and tested at scale, let alone economic compared with the alternatives.
one of the things I think Civil Society has to be aware of is that there's been 00:09:33 a deliberate misuse of the prospects of technology
In addition to their high GHG emissions from consumption, high-SES people have disproportionate climate influence through at least four non-consumer roles: as investors, as role models within their social networks and for others who observe their choices, as participants in organizations and as citizens seeking to influence public policies or corporate behaviour
We focus on individuals and households with high socioeconomic status (SES; henceforth, high-SES people) because they have generated many of the problems of fossil fuel dependence that affect the rest of humanity.
We are all related
Guided mediation
comment
Ecology and evolution provide the scientific background needed to address the biodiversity crisis; Zen provides the deeper knowing that will motivate our action to address this problem.
I try to remember that it's not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather I'm part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.John Seed (in Macy, 1991: page 184)
We will act to save “life on this planet” only if we recognize at a deep level that our “self” includes all beings. We need to recognize and feel at a deep level that ultimately we are not biologists trying to save other species. Rather, we are one emergence of life on this planet trying to save itself.
8 out of 10 people who reproduced in northern Europe 1,000 years ago are the ancestors of all living people with some European ancestry.
uided meditation: When did your life begin?
There is a traditional Zen koan which is often stated something like this: “What was your Original Face before your parents were born?” There is no such thing as a “correct” answer for a koan. This koan is sometimes interpreted as an invitation to contemplate one's ancestry.
Guided meditation: The carbon cycle
Carbon cycle meditation
Comment
guided meditation to help achieve this awareness of our physical connection to the world around us.
“If we want to continue to enjoy our rivers ‐ to swim in them, walk beside them, even drink their water ‐ we have to adopt the non‐dual perspective. We have to meditate on being the rivers so that we can experience within ourselves the fears and hopes of the rivers. If we cannot feel the rivers, the mountains, the air, the animals, and other people from within their own perspective, the rivers will die and we will lose our chance for peace”
The ecologist David Barash (1973) discussed the parallels between Zen Buddhism and ecology.
author
comment
The Buddhist concept of interconnectedness or emptiness (all things are empty of a separate self) is represented by the metaphor of the Jewel Net of Indra
Abstract
I present mindfulness and meditative aspects of Zen practice that provide the deeper “knowing,” or awareness that we need to inspire action on these problems.
comment
My overall objective in this paper is to
date
Executive Summary
The consequences of our current choices bear not juston us. They bear on the continued evolutionary unfoldingof life in the universe. This marks the scale of our currentresponsibility
we now have a decade—if that—to achieve a dramatic redirection of thehuman course as a now globally interdependentspecies.
Civil society is the sector where the power of We thePeople ultimately and properly resides.
Human institutions are purely human creations. Theironly legitimate purpose is to serve the people on whomtheir existence ultimately depends. If institutions fail toserve us, then it is our right to eliminate or transformthem
Labor in a fully func-tioning Ecological Civilization will include three essentialelements.
The spiritual labor required to continuously renew our sense of individual and collective connection to all that is.
comment
The surplus of life’s labor is not sufficient to con-tinue bearing the burden of a caste system devoted tocontrolling the many so a few can indulge in egotisti-cal displays of privilege on a dying Earth. The more ofhumanity’s labor we devote to maintaining the system ofdomination, the less that is available to secure life’s wellbe-ing and the more rapid the living system’s collapse.
for: caste system, caste, inequality, carbon inequality,
quote
parantheses
new adjacency
for: ecological civilization, climate emergency, climate EMERGEncy inner/outer transformation, eco civilization, rapid whole system change
Title
the whole world to me is a 00:19:25 kind of um Collision or or Criss-Cross or overlap between past and future
Ludwig firebach has this idea that religion is a place where human 00:12:22 beings sort of um alienate their intrinsic superpowers right they they turn them inside out and they push them into some kind of Heaven which is basically the future
-quote - religion is a place where human beings alienate their intrinsic superpowers - author - Timotny Morton, quoting Ludwig Feuerbach
here's also a kind of Shadow side to this approach which is which we could call maybe religios as opposed to religious in in 00:03:51 English it's religious o-s-e adjective and um this is very very common actually in ecological language whether it's in newspapers or books or anything music art anything that says that there needs 00:04:05 to be a very profound sudden massive change in ourselves um is is I think a dangerous
the entire biosphere is made out of 00:41:23 um female desire for no reason no reason to it right night not with an objective of reproducing but just with an objective of wow that's really sexy I like it 00:41:35 and that's a very very good reason isn't it to to save the planet
The Divine image
beauty is how truth feels
but what I do then is I get out of bed brush my teeth go in the kitchen and I make breakfast for my kids and I don't 00:38:33 share that state of mind I have another state of mind that I'm going to share with them and so I think this is the point right we need to we need um loving strong creative gentle 00:38:44 rhetoric that's going to help us to be creative and imagine something new
global warming is the biggest problem on the planet therefore we have to make it be the most 00:37:37 attractive sexiest ever problem to solve
one of the reasons 00:34:46 why we don't do it is that we think there needs to also be a sudden huge change inside but actually there doesn't need to be a sudden age change inside at all
you don't 00:33:51 have to be ecological because you are ecological yeah you do not require some kind of massive transformation something in here knows that you're an ecological being 00:34:06 because you are you're a life form yeah all you have to do is notice right that you are already yeah and my cat for real knows I'm an ecological being right that my cat Oliver is relying on me to give 00:34:20 him the food every day he knows that he coexists with me in some kind of relationship right so we don't have to think anything special right we have to do things right we have to do things and 00:34:33 the thing we have to do is incredibly simple to say we have to stop burning carbon um that's it right you just have to stop it
key insight
comment
theology managed to change right from from the medieval theology
capitalist economics is notoriously bad at considering non-human beings and it's also notoriously bad at considering 00:10:56 the future Beyond a certain amount of time
the trouble with that film is that maybe first of all no one who is an Evangelical Christian where I live is 00:06:00 actually going to watch that film second of all those guys already know in a way what the film is saying
I personally think that there needs 00:03:26 to be some kind of of religion scale energy uh quality um to the way in which human beings confront this problem
this talk I've decided to give you is actually called The Human Form divine um I understand that one of the topics we're interested in is dimensional transformation 00:02:48 um of the self and and transformation of of uh the ecosystem or ecosystems um and in general I think we're all interested in the notion of imagination and and creativity and what can that do 00:03:02 for us in in actually a very practical sense
we place value on life. But I think we have to understand that all forms of life have value, and that we can't place human value above all those other values and that the diversity itself 00:20:57 has value, the complexity has value.
question
definition
Description
Reflections Overall,
Rex
Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.
William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.
tautology is a word we don't use very often. It doesn't come up in relationship to ecological processes as often, I think, as it should.
I think things will unfold exactly as nature requires that they do. There will be, unless humans actively and intelligently implement our own process of negative feedbacks so that we withdraw our dominance from the ecosystems of which we are apart, then nature will do it for 01:26:57 us.
accepting our animal nature, and end this human exceptionalism, which blinds us to our animal nature, just for starters. If we have a meeting about climate or biodiversity, in our minds we need to invite all other creatures to those meetings. And I'm not just trying to be foolish or silly here. I'm serious, I'm dead serious about it. We 01:24:09 need to be sitting at the table with the elephants and the jaguars and the wolves and the algae and the apple trees and the bees and allowing those voices somehow into our conversation.
It does not make sense for one species to command most of the energy flow through the ecosystems of which it is a part. That's a very destabilizing situation. And the wise species would do everything possible to reestablish some kind of balanced energy and material throughput. If we don't do that, again, 01:15:52 I keep harping on this, people hate me for it, but we will go down
No fairness, again, is a human construct. 01:10:41 And I mentioned before, evolution doesn't care. If a species is going extinct, evolution doesn't freak out and go, oh, we got to keep that species. It just happens. There's no thinking being back there going, well, should we let them go or not? And let's face it, 01:11:12 when we eat the blackberries off the vine, that's their babies. Is that fair that we eat the babies of the blackberries?
So I think it's fairly clear that we agree there's going to be contraction. And the question then becomes ,what are we really talking about? And I think as a rough way to begin thinking about this, could the world with 8 billion people live sustainably in the absence of fossil fuel?
because contraction is inevitable, the question then is how do we do that best together? And that the wisdom in that is not 00:57:31 going to be packaged in a book. The wisdom of that is going to be in the particular and a sensitivity to the particular
If I can pick up on that, Rex is going back to something I said a little bit earlier about unsustainability, or at least unsustainable 00:46:47 behavior being a natural phenomenon, because we are far better than any other species at exploiting our habitats.
Well, I'll say there's a danger in that question. It's a good question and it's a question we should be asking, but there's a danger, and that is that we're going to come up with a model for ecological community and then we're going to make it happen. And that right away violates everything that Nora just pointed out. That's absolutely critically important.
If you think of a plague of locusts or a plague of mice or frogs or whatever, every species, when it is situated in an environment 00:39:06 which for whatever set of juxtapositional reasons is favorable to the expansion of that species, it will explode and expand. And humans are no different. With fossil fuel, we acquired the ability to exploit the planet and provide all the other resources needed to grow the human enterprise to realize for the first time in human history, our full exponential growth potential.
our economic system is a social construct which includes no useful information whatsoever about the ecological relationships. Or for that matter, even the social relationships with which the economy interacts in the real world.
Where we get caught is thinking that we can identify a static snapshot in 00:13:20 an ecological process and get control over it, we can enact something upon it, and thinking that we can do that toward what has been perceived as a positive outcome. Without recognizing that with all of these different organisms that are changing each other all the time, we're actually going to make a mess.
for: progress trap
example
I think this is also part of our sense of who we are as humans, as ourselves, and the idea of the self, the individual, and even the humans as this individual species, these divisions are arbitrary.
we talk about human rights and we want to protect our human rights. We have to expand that sense of human rights to the rest of the world and understood. We don't have the right to 00:21:48 destroy that diversity which is critical and which has inherent value.
So something about our process is completely wrong. Something about our understanding of ecology is completely wrong. But for me, I look back at, for example, the Daoists. To me, the Daoists understood very deeply the complexity. Daoism really starts with just accepting the mystery and the complexity 00:19:33 of the world and not trying to necessarily explain it all, and then to pattern behavior after these natural processes
"In the paper we sketch five different roles
for: carbon inequality, W2W, leverage point
five leverage points
people who are wealthy contribute the most to causing climate change, they are unfortunately also in the most ideal position to help us mitigate climate change.
"The top 1% use basically a similar amount to the bottom 50% of humanity.
Sciences told us that if we want to abide by this 1.5 degree Centigrade uh limit of Paris agreement we have to cut our emissions by 50 00:10:35 percent by the end of this decade by 2030 almost 50 percent so but but there is this is a huge ask and you know I cannot um answer your question because a 00:10:47 million dollar question that a world should come together uh somebody like me sitting in a developing country with its economy struggling I can only hope that that 00:10:58 put together do Collective action we need the transformation of our Energy System
we're also showing that these tipping elements are interconnected in 00:10:41 so-called Cascades
the graph you see here shows the two Alternatives we have 00:12:22 either we really radically reduce emissions and come to Net Zero by 2040 with limited overshoot
for: bend the curve, planetary boundaries, planetary tipping points, 1.5 Degree, overshoot 1.5 Degree C
two alternatives
with the Earth commission has taken up all this science a first attempt of being a kind of a community effort 00:14:53 scientifically to really give businesses and cities in the world quantitative boundaries to work with to operationalize as science-based targets
this is now quantifying this this safe space but for the first time also doing it for justice so measuring the maximum allowed 00:15:33 of significant harm to people and the key take home here is the following in the outer ring here the red and green you see the safe boundary definitions 00:15:45 the blue lines are the assessment of justice so not surprisingly if we care about people the safe bound is about the stability of the planet but if we care about avoiding significant harm to hundreds of millions of people across 00:15:58 the world the climate boundary shrinks from 1.5 down to one degree
you may have seen last week that the global carbon budget to 00:11:43 have a chance of holding 1.5 was cut by half so no longer 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide but rather 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide remaining to have a chance of holding 1.5 that's only like 00:11:56 six seven years under current burning of fossil fuels so an orderly phase out means that we really need to start bending the curve immediately and reduce emissions by in the order of six to seven percent per year to have a net 00:12:09 Seer World economy between 2014 and 2050
this is 30 years of ipcc Assessments from the third assessment in 2009 all the way to the 1.5 degrees Celsius 00:09:50 assessment a few years back this is the red Embers diagram of confidence in science and what you see for each column is the assessment of risk of irreversible changes and at what 00:10:03 temperature levels 20 years ago at the third assessment the risk was basically assessed as zero because it was set at six degrees Celsius nobody was suggesting we would end up at six degrees but look at the trend line the 00:10:16 more we learn about the planet the more we understand about the coupled interactive Earth system the lower is the temperature at which we put risks of irreversible changes and it's down in 00:10:29 the less than two degrees Celsius range now blinking red so that's where we are
the Breakthrough here is that for the first time we've been able to put temperature thresholds on the 00:08:44 likely temperatures when we cross the Tipping points that's the color schemes you see in the color coding these five are the ones we really need to be concerned with because they are the first ones on the line at 1.5 degrees 00:08:58 Celsius they're likely to cross their tipping points we're talking here about the green and ice sheet the West Antarctic ice sheet all the tropical coral reef systems home to over 500 million people's livelihood 00:09:11 the Boreal permafrost a breath throwing a permafrost and loss of the barren sea ice
we're following a path that would take us to 2.7 degrees Celsius even if all the nationally determined contributions are implemented 00:07:39 by the end of this century let me just make one point very clear 2.7 degrees Celsius is without any doubt a disaster it's a point we haven't seen for the 00:07:52 past five million years there's no evidence that we can support Humanity as we know it on a 2.7 degrees Celsius planet so we really need to transition and 1.5 00:08:04 is the scientific limit that we now need to hold on to
an extraordinary Insight a healthy 00:06:09 Planet applies this biogeochemical processes to remain in the Holocene and just look at the graph a Kindergarten kid sees the pattern the more we disturb a healthy planet is helping us trying 00:06:22 more and more
we actually have data showing that why is the planet so stable under healthy conditions well it's because of the resilience and we have 00:05:21 data on that as well
we are modern humans we've been around as modern humans for 00:04:32 200 000 years on Earth but we are hunters and gatherers we have a rough time we live under extremely variable conditions in deep Ice Age we come into the Holocene the neolithical revolution takes part one of the biggest 00:04:44 Innovations in human history and off we go in the civilizational journey that we all know and here we are today
at third act where we organize old people like me over the age 00:05:36 of 60. we're concentrating on democracy and on climate they seem uh they seem the twin crises that we face
for: polycrisis, dual crisis, climate change and political polarization
key insight
I think the first thing 00:04:49 we have to do and what governments have been reluctant to do is to say we've got to stop making it worse now the government is saying we've got to start adapting to the changes yes we do but we 00:05:04 have to stop making it worse which means for heaven's sakes we've got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as we can
we compiled all the species that we try and get a handle on and we then tried to 00:05:06 relate those species list to Manhattan Island through a new kind of science that we call muir webs and that kind of data it turns out that you can visualize and understand as a network
Muir Web
The common definition of a progress trap is derived from the book’s cover text: “..it is the condition in which we find ourselves when science, technology and industry create more problems than they can solve. Often inadvertently.”
The concept of the purity of science should be abandoned.
Since humanity is a small product of nature, he can by definition not control nature. To believe that he can is a delusion.
Escaping The Progress Trap
for: progress trap, progress traps
Tttle
four mitigating factors that make power appear to corrupt when something else is actually going on.
Winston Churchill had a secret 01:47:06 that the Germans didn't know during the middle of the war. The secret was this. They had cracked the Nazi enigma codes.
when you see that the rates of domestic abuse among police officers in the United States is higher than the general average in the public. So, you know, when you think about why that's happening, perhaps it's that the job is making them a bit more on edge or causing them to behave in certain ways. I think what's more likely is that people who are abusive 01:32:41 are disproportionately likely to seek out a job in which you can abuse people. Now, this is not to say that police officers are bad people, but it is to say that, for the slice of the population that is abusive, especially the people who like to wield power and carry a gun and terrorize people, for them, as one of the police officers in London told me who's in charge of recruitment for the Metropolitan Police, she said to me, "Look, if you're an abusive bigot, 01:33:06 policing is an attractive career choice. It doesn't mean that police officers are generally abusive bigots. It means that for that slice of the population, they like the idea of being able to professionally abuse people."
Doraville, Georgia.
to eliminate the problem of self-selection bias 01:24:31 by producing shadow bodies of power that provide oversight to the real body of power, but that is randomly selected
I wish there was a certain question 01:22:26 that was asked to people who wanted to wield immense amounts of power that is often not asked. And that question is this. What would it take for you to think that you are no longer necessary in power?
most of what we do when we look at power is we say, "This person is bad, let's get them out." And then we end up with another bad person a few minutes later or a few months later. And as a result of that, we end up replicating the exact same problems over and over and over.
And so when we have this simplistic view of power, we're missing the story. What you really need is a system that attracts the right kind of people 01:18:20 so that the diplomats who are clean and nice and rule-following end up in power. Then you need a system that gives them all the right incentives to follow the rules once they get there. And then if you do have people who break the rules, there needs to be consequences. So the study from UN diplomats and their parking behavior actually, I think, illuminates a huge amount of very interesting dynamics around power,
So if you have a president 01:19:36 or a prime minister who's won an election, there's no training, there's no oversight, there's no scrutiny other than journalists from the outside. There's often not a criminal background check for politicians before an election. And yet when you end up as a tour guide, you have all sorts of safeguarding, you have training.
we should have some psychological screening at the top jobs. I think that there should be an expectation that people who are about to control nuclear weapons, that can literally wipe out our species, should, at a minimum, be subject to a psychological test.
the reason I focus on the system so much is not just because it's something that's so important, it is, but also because it's the most straightforward thing to change. Trying to change a psychopath or trying to change a bad leader is hard.
systems make an enormous difference. Systems make a difference on a few levels. The first is that rotten systems attract rotten people.
if we want to end up with a world that is shaped by the best of us, rather than very often the worst of us, we have to think carefully, we have to engineer a system.
So what you end up having is in positions of power that are particularly dangerous, psychopaths are much more likely to seek those positions of power because they don't view the danger as a threat to them.
One of the interesting things about my job is I go around the world, and sometimes I sit down with former heads of state in authoritarian countries, people who basically were dictators 01:02:25 or despots until a few years ago. And what's striking about these people is that they have basically inhabited the ideal world for a Machiavellian narcissistic psychopath, somebody with the dark triad traits.
for the most part, if you're high on the psychopathy score, you're usually pretty high on the narcissism and Machiavellian score as well.
This is why, by the way, the job interview is a terrible way of sorting out people because the job interview is a performance for a very short period of time. And what psychopaths are extremely good at doing is making people like them, especially because they're chameleon-like, they can sort of morph, depending on what they think people want to hear, in this short period of time.
superficial charm
a psychopath's ability to make you like them, so that you can be manipulated
superficial charm blinds us to the psychopath
For psychopaths, it tends to be switched off by default. But they're actually really good at mimicking a normal brain if and when they need to.
Steve Raucci was unable to control his impulses. He was unable to sort of dial it back when he needed to. He was unable to blend in 00:45:57 as a normal functioning member of his staff, and instead did all sorts of crazy things that made people realize that he was probably a psychopath. The successful psychopaths are in boardrooms, they're managing hedge funds, they're in politics. They're the people who are ruthless, who are very power-hungry, and are very good at getting power because like Steve Raucci, they're able to hatch extremely complicated plots 00:46:23 in order to get their way. They're extremely disciplined at times, when they're successful psychopaths, to get their way, to engineer the outcome they desire. So the successful psychopaths are the worst of every world.
dark triad traits
we have all sorts of stupid biases when it comes to leadership selection.
the problem starts to rear its ugly head in incredibly bizarre and depressing ways. One of the ways that we know this happens is in the criminal justice system.
lots of research is that names matter a huge amount, as do faces.
snowy peaks problem.
Why are we drawn to people who are clearly not 00:20:59 in the business of public service but want to abuse us and often show us that they are strong men who are oriented towards conquering and dominating rather than serving us? And that puts the mirror back on us. And the answer, I think, is partly to do with evolutionary psychology.
when we think about self-selection bias and survivorship bias in tandem, we have a really important understanding of how power actually operates
Abraham Wald
What is survivorship bias?
The same is true for power. People who are power-hungry, people who are psychopaths tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us. And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people, 00:14:51 are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us
the problem is that we've engineered a society in which power itself is costly to everyone, and that means that the only people who think it's worth paying the cost are those who are power-hungry.
power-hungry literally means someone who wants power. Someone who wants power 00:11:34 is going to seek power more than everybody else. As a result of that, we have a real problem on our hands. How do we stop this, right? So there's a few answers.
when we design systems in an intelligent way, we can screen out 00:11:09 and topple the Martin McFifes of this world.
power is something that draws 00:10:21 in the wrong kinds of people like moths to a flame. So the way you deal with that is you attract more people to basically be able to zap some of the bad moths and be left with ones who are actually in it for the right reasons. And that's why recruitment is so important.
some systems of power have absolutely no barriers,
What are your four main arguments about power?
How do we end up designing systems that attract all of the right people into power
self-selection effect
power does corrupt. We have plenty of evidence that it changes your psychology, it changes your neuroscience, it changes your brain, but it's only a small part of the story. And the much more interesting part of the story is how people interact with systems and why we end up with the wrong people in charge.
Lord Acton
Why is it that despite incredible 21st century advances in every realm of medicine and science and so on, we still are stuck with all the wrong people in charge of our lives?
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most people don't realize how vulnerable we are I mean for example the the food supply in the average city in the United States if it's not daily 00:01:44 renewed would run out in about three days there's not much of a buffer there
The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population,
when the size of the committed minority reached~25% of the population, a tipping point wastriggered, and the minority group succeeded inchanging the established social convention.