Inflection

I am presenting you with several viewpoints of what I consider our current place in the cyclic.  This place is at a point of inflection.  The point of inflection is where a concave turns convex.  In the cyclic of growth and decline this is the point of phase change.  This point of inflection is now characterized by a convergence of diminishing value of technology, energy, economics, and human centralization. 

I am speaking to you the individual.  You are locked into this convergence and inflection because of the macro world you live and depend on.  This macro world of human progress is determined in a systematic self-organization.  This world is now a system characterized by the rigidity of path dependency and a common denominator of carbon.  In other words, the system can only operate as it did, change is not possible.  Nothing at a large scale can happen without carbon-based energy. 

Carbon-based energy is in net energy decline.  This is geologic and economic making it impervious to a continuation of normal.  Obviously, renewables are dead in the water if you have done the deep research.  Their basis is carbon so there is no way to replace carbon with something based on carbon.  A KW is not a KW in this case.  What this means is change is not possible and a continuation of status quo is in the process of winding down.  The status quo can’t wind down because of its path dependencies of expansion.  This is why I call this the inflection.

Deviation is not an option for this self-organizing system.  Deviation means collapse but so does continuation.  This is what civilizations do and always have done once there expansion grinds to a halt.  The difference now is this is a global civilization.  It is empire of a global elite.  These global elites have no interest in adapting to phase change.  They are engaged in the moral hazard of private enhancement at the expense of the public’s welfare.  They are doubling down on policies of centralization that benefit them at the expanse of the masses.  Decentralization is what is required.  Deconstruction, dematerialization, and decoupling are the right polices now for inflection.  The developing systematic forces demand this so what you will have is a point where multiple aspects of human and planetary systems shift to a new state.

The time frame is uncertain and really cannot be known.  What can be known and is plain as day to those honest and awakened is the trend.  This may occur over a longer time period.  Sudden collapse is of course increasingly possible.  I would say this decline will be both short term and long term.  The unfolding will be macro and micro.  What we are seeing is planetary with ecosystems and systems being human forced.  There is the decline of the global civilization influence by the planetary system but also declining from within with economic, Social and political issues.  It is this forcing, converging, and negative reinforcement that makes the coming shift so dramatic.  Compression and overshoot are building meaning thresholds are being tested and increasingly crossed.  

How you approach this convergence and inflection is critical.  A diminishing point of value is when decline sets in to your life’s efforts.  Value here can be defined physically with normal metrics of prosperity and comfort.  On the metaphysical level it is truth and meaning.  Increasingly you will feel poorer but also a spiritual meaninglessness of it all.  This spirtuality is not your religion.  I am pointing to the abstract of meaning you feel when you reflect on life.  You may turn to religion to fill this but this is a reaction to a underlying reality in flux. 

This inflection of value is directly related to macro conditions.  You are a cog in the machine so you have no choice but to be part of this process.  The critical element here for you the individual, family, and small community is because this is a type of ecosystem then within this process value growth is possible.  The reason for this is when a complex system declines niches are freed up.  If you accept decline and embrace its forces then you will by nature make better decisions based on the system’s trend.

Spiritual growth is in a different dimension from the physical but they are by no means unrelated.  They revolve around each other and it is the proper scale that leads to the balance of the two.  In times of growth and decline scale and balance are altered.  Spirituality is set to go through an inflection to a growing of value from a period where it was all but destroyed by the religion of science commonly called scientism.  Dramatic materialistic living resulting from scientism has reduced spirituality to novelty.  All religions have been infected by scientism.  Religion today is a business and must operate as organizations.  Organization must follow the status quo of rule of law and best practices.  These have been infected with corruption so all religions are subject to this corruption.

In this case, I speak of spirituality in its raw form divorced from man’s intelligence.  This spirituality that permeates all and derived from the sacred will be the inverse to our physical decline.  Materialism will decline and with it an opening up of spirituality will result.  When you uncover our naked souls by removing all the distractions we burden ourselves with, spirituality naturally fills the void.  Science became supreme in the age of globalism.  It became a religion and prosperity the sacrament.  In doing so a great distortion of truth and meaning occurred.  Now that science’s value declines spirituality will fill in the vacuum.  Truth and meaning will result to those who are awakened then transformed.

This value growth of you the individual within overall decline does not mean necessarily more value.  Instead, this value growth within decline points to less decline relatively.  You will be on the right track and suffer less.  Suffering will be the theme of this coming bottleneck.  It is the acceptance of this budding bottleneck and the embrace of proper lifestyle for decline that can mitigate the worst of what is ahead.  Yet, there are no refuges from suffering even for those who are enlightened and engaged.  This is a global event but with some places and people experiencing less suffering.  The science is available to know where the worst could happen.  We also know there are things we are unable to know.  Yet, there are unknown unknowns that are unique to this time in the history of the planet that is a global human population in overshoot of both consumption and population.

I recommend you embrace decline and in doing so you avoid fighting the systematic current of decline that is the phase change of the cyclic.  This is a retreat in force or a flexible retreat.  Pick your battles and invest wisely.  Wisdom of what value to embrace and what to avoid is critical.  Spiritually, avoid fearing fear.   This is the debilitating effects of anxiety and paralysis in the face of fear.  You will experience this regardless but being aware of this condition immediately relieves some of the negative effects.  Loss from decline is a fearful experience.  There is no sugar coating this to sanitize the consequences for all.  If you accept that loss is ahead then there is no switching of efforts which involves changing course.  Instead, you are going with the flow and the flow will support you by allowing better decisions.  Your efforts to slow the decline will be more natural.

REAL Green is a focus on green prepping.  It is a spirituality of proper wisdom and involves the science of being prepared.  The science focuses on homesteading and permaculture.  The spirituality focuses on acceptance and humility for a process of decline that is planetary and within our global civilization.  This is the science and spirituality of lifeboats and hospices.  A monastery of art and literature is used to assemble needed knowhow and wisdom for the journey.  This is a journey.  Death is the destination but a good death.

REAL Green seeks localism with community.  Since the world is delocalized and increasingly urbanized REAL Green is for just a few.   Despite this handicap of delocalization, you should know a best practice that is the proper way to embrace decline even if you are trapped.   This delocalization is physical but also spiritual.  Modern life has isolated people from family and friends.  Local community has been all but destroyed as it once was.  We have lost meaning and no longer have comfort in a feeling that we are following the truth.  Even the most devout are constantly bombarded with alternatives to what gives them meaning.  This is the nature of the out of control progress of science and development that is increasingly creating more problems than are being solved.  Science and materialism are now the problem instead of the tools to solve problems.

If you want to be a leader and if you have the right stuff then REAL Green is a path forward.  You will need resources.  You will need education.  Most of all you will need time.  Since we are at or near the non-liner of when this inflection shifts occurs, time is speeding up.  The point of diminishing value is now entering negative value of problem solving being the problem.  This speeding up is as much about compression as tempo.  This compression is the approach to a nonlinear increase at which point the shift occurs.  Once shifted your environment will be beyond normal efforts to adapt.  It will then be characterized by the luck of being in the right place at the right time.  This is the nature of a bottleneck.  Proper orientation now before the shift happens is critical.  It appears there is still time to adapt.  Delocalization has dispersed risk to all locals but the same delocalization that is so destructive also has benefits.   of Globalization means there are still lots of resources available to rebuild localism.

Positioning now while you still can is a keystone first step.  Find the right place but also change your lifestyle to reflect this process.  Update your spiritualism of a higher power and meaning with the paradigm of destructive change.  This message is for leadership and for those with the right stuff.  It is no use for the 90% who do not understand or don’t have the right stuff.  For the people who do not understand or are trapped in circumstances, their hopes are for a leader among them to guide and assist.  This longing for a real leader will be more pronounced as difficult times deepen.   How dramatic but also the duration is a key element of this time of inflection.  It is the interaction of degree and duration that can be managed in some ways to make things less bad.  A longer duration can be mitigated with tools lowering degree.  A forceful degree can be made shorter so a bounce back is possible.  First acceptance and humility are required to begin to engage these forces of decline.  This is where spirituality takes front and center.

Please review the referenced works for viewpoints on decline.

 Carl Schmitt one said “A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology.”

“Inflection point.  In differential calculus and differential geometry, an inflection point, point of inflection, flex, or inflection is a point on a smooth plane curve at which the curvature changes sign. In particular, in the case of the graph of a function, it is a point where the function changes from being concave to convex, or vice versa. Wikipedia

Electrification, digitalization, webification, datafication, personalization, actuation, and marketization

“This theoretical essay argues that the development of so-called ‘smart innovations’ is based on the monotonous application of seven standardized principles: electrification, digitalization, webification, datafication, personalization, actuation, and marketization. When a new smart innovation appears, what has typically occurred was the implementation of these principles to an object or process that, until that moment, had managed to remain unscathed by the smart innovation monoculture. As reactions to this dominant logic, ten major critical arguments against smart innovations have emerged in the academic literature: smart innovations are considered to be superseding, unhealthy, subordinating, exploitative, manipulative, addictive, fragile, colonial, labyrinthine, and both ecologically and socially unsustainable.”

Ferreira, António. “Seven Principles and Ten Criticisms: Towards a Charter for the Analysis, Transformation and Contestation of Smart Innovations.” Sustainability 14.19 (2022): 12713.

“The Seven Immutable Principles of Smartness”

“electrification, digitalization, webification, datafication, personalization, actuation, and marketization”

“The implementation of smart innovations, whatever they might be, depends on a set of sequential principles. These principles can be considered the DNA of smartness, as currently understood in the dominant technological, academic, and political circles.”

“The first principle is electrification: the conversion of things (whatever they might be; for example, toothbrushes, watches, kitchen appliances, motorized vehicles, factory machines, governance practices, public participation processes, etc.) that were hitherto powered by physical or intellectual labor, fossil fuels, or any other form of energy into things powered by electricity.”

“Electrification is a basic prerequisite for the second principle to be implemented, that of digitalization. In contrast to analogue technologies (such as old radios, but also mercury thermometers), smart technologies (e.g., 5G mobile phones) convert and provide information through the use of computational units. This means that the sound produced by an old radio is a direct acoustic manifestation of the radio waves received by the radio device, similarly to how the level of mercury inside a thermometer is determined by the extent to which the mercury expands or contracts inside its glass tube as the temperature varies. This also means that while some analogue technologies depend on electricity to work (e.g., old radios), some of these technologies are independent from any electricity source (e.g., mercury thermometers). Conversely, smart technologies always need electric power to work because they rely on digital processors to compute data. For example, the sound produced by a smart phone is the result of a networked computing process, which converts acoustic waves into quantified data streams that have to be analyzed by the smart phone processor so that the data can be converted back into sound. All these computational procedures consume electric energy and require electric components to be performed.”

“The third principle of smart technologies is webification. This can be defined as the process of incrementally creating the IoT, that is, a pervasive system capable of emitting and receiving in real time multiple streams of data from multiple interconnected devices, preferably using wireless connections. Without webification, the fourth principle, that of datafication, cannot be implemented.”

“With datafication, it is meant that when a given technology is used, the technology will not only produce and/or use digital data so that it can work in the way it is supposed to, but it will also have the means to store such data. There are two options for storing data: in the device itself (which grants limited possibilities for data use and is therefore discouraged) and in centralized data centers (that is, in the memory of super computers) where the data of multiple devices and from multiple users is compounded into an increasingly larger dataset. This grants a much higher number of possibilities for data usage and exploitation than when the data is exclusively stored in each device, and in particular when multiple datasets are combined into big datasets. Questions such as who did what, when, how, with whom, and at what time are becoming absolutely key for the organization of these databases. This takes us to the next principle: personalization.”

“By personalization, it is meant that smart technologies tend to work only after the user provides a personalized username and password or—in more advanced cases—after the identity of the user is determined through some biometric reading. After the identity of the user has been identified, the technology will produce data that will include a reference to inform who the user was when the data was produced. The large datasets that are typically compiled as a result of smart technology utilization can be, and are typically, applied to build a very precise profile for each user. With this, individuals are converted into data streams in the same way that smart technologies are also converted into data streams. Another feature of personalization is that each smart technology adapts itself to meet the needs and aspirations of each user—sometimes with the (either explicit or implicit) goal of changing his or her perceptions, thoughts, and behaviors. This takes us to the next principle: that of actuation.”

“Smart technologies follow the principle of actuation to different degrees. At the highest degrees, actuation is achieved through complete automation or quasi-automation of smart technologies. When full automation is deployed, these technologies become active in either forcing selected individuals to behave in given ways, or in replacing their work and/or presence completely. For example, consider a fully automated vehicle that will compulsorily replace the human driver, as there will neither be driving controls inside the cabin nor the option to turn off the automated driving functions. At the lowest degrees, actuation is achieved by means of nudging selected users to perceive certain things instead of others, or to behave in given ways.”

“The last of the seven principles is marketization. With marketization, it is meant that opportunities for capitalizing on smart technologies are actively explored at all times. Marketization can be achieved through selling, buying, and exploring both smart tech devices and data-related market opportunities; by means of delivering higher levels of personalization so that individuals become willing or are forced to pay for it; or by means of putting actuation at the service of profitable ends that serve the interests of individuals, organizations, or lobbies that can pay for such services—just to mention some obvious possibilities.”

https://www.korowiczhumansystems.com/publications

Click to access Beyond+Resilience+White+Paper+pdf.pdf

“Deepening Vulnerability: As the human systems that enable societal functioning (the grid, supply chains, the financial system, telecommunications, behavioral coordination) become ever more globalised, complex, inter-dependent and high-speed, our vulnerability to largescale systemic failure is increasing. In particular modern societies – including Western Europe, Japan and the United States – could rapidly transition from the familiar functioning to crises undermining food security, access to water, sanitation, the function of the economy, public health, communications, emergency services, public order and governance. This transition period may last from weeks to a few years, depending on conditions. The initial trigger could be a major pandemic, a financial system collapse, a cyber-attack on critical infrastructure, a natural disaster, a protracted environmental catastrophe, a socio-political crisis, or some confluence of stresses and shocks. If the initial affected region or network is of sufficient scale, is critically connected, and preparedness is weak, recovery may become impossible and the impacted region/network may itself become a source of destabilizing global contagion. Such a breakdown would mean reliance on localised resources without most of the infrastructures and capacities currently taken for granted. There could be diverse outcomes – depending on natural, social and physical capital, the stresses from adjacent regions, and levels of prior preparedness.”

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2022/10/19/242-the-dynamics-of-global-re-pricing/

“the relationship between underlying economic output and the use of energy is linear.”

“de-coupling” the economy from the use of energy cannot happen.”

“if we consume less energy, the economy gets smaller”

“energy-intensive, non-essential economic activities will contract rapidly”

“It should never be forgotten – though it almost routinely is – that the potential capabilities of technology are limited by the laws of physics.  These are important points, because it’s all too easy to assume that the economy can transition, seamlessly, from fossil fuels to renewables. This mistaken assumption – and it’s no more than that – informs vast swathes of corporate, financial and government planning.”

“By 2040, global prosperity is projected to be 16% lower than it was in 2021.”

“If population numbers continue to rise, albeit at historically low rates, prosperity per capita could decrease by 27% between 2021 and 2040.  At no point since 1776 – not even during the Great Depression between the wars, which caused severe hardship, but was temporary – have we ever had to confront anything even remotely comparable.”

“None of this, of course, is yet incorporated into the futurity currently priced by the markets. But the unfolding deterioration in underlying economic conditions can be expected to compress the gap between financial expectation and material economic reality.”

“A best estimate is that total financial exposure stands at about 575% of World GDP, but 925% of global prosperity.  Perhaps the single most disturbing aspect of worsening imbalances is the extent of leverage embodied in the economy and the financial system.  As we have seen, a projected decrease of 8% in energy supply between now and 2040 produces a corresponding decrease in real global economic output. But rises in ECoEs leverage this into a 16% fall in aggregate prosperity.”

“This implies that prosperity per capita will be about 27% lower in 2040 than it was in 2021. But the cost of energy-intensive necessities will carry on rising markedly, in response to increases in ECoE. This is illustrated in Fig. 4C. This implies a near-50% fall in the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services, even though top-line economic output is only projected to fall by 8%.”

“When we consider, for example, the affordability of mortgage payments, it’s clear that this affordability must be related, not to total household incomes, but to household disposable incomes, and much the same applies at macroeconomic level.  This is why, where the business and broader economic outlook is concerned, we have entered an affordability crisis. This has two implications.  First, and most obviously, consumers whose disposable resources are being compressed between falling incomes and the rising costs of necessities experience a leveraged reduction in what they can afford to spend on discretionary purchases.  Second, it becomes ever harder for households to sustain payments on everything from secured and unsecured credit to subscriptions and staged-payment purchases.”

“the outlook is for RRCI to trend downwards, though remaining above officially-acknowledged rates of broad inflation. Though the costs of essentials will continue to rise, we should anticipate severe and worsening deflation across the discretionary and ‘stream-of-income’ sectors of the economy.”

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/10/18/why-financial-approaches-wont-fix-the-worlds-economic-problems-this-time/

“there is no way for the quantity of goods and services produced to grow sufficiently to match the promises that the financial system has made. This is the real bottleneck that the world economy reaches.”

“affordability obstacles. The physics of the situation somehow causes the wages and wealth to be increasingly concentrated among the top 10% or 1%. Lower-paid individuals are increasingly left out. While goods are still produced, ever-fewer workers can afford more than basic necessities. Such a situation makes for unhappy workers.  World energy consumption per capita hit a peak in 2018”

“There is no possibility of ever transitioning to a system that operates only on intermittent electricity with the population that Europe has today, or that the world has today. Wind turbines and solar panels are built and maintained using fossil fuel energy. Transmission lines cannot be maintained using intermittent electricity alone.”

“families can move in together, fewer buildings in total will need to be heated. Cooking can perhaps be done for larger groups at a time, saving on fuel.”

“If families can home-school their children, this saves both the energy for transportation to school and the energy for heating the school. If families can keep younger children at home, instead of sending them to daycare, this saves energy, as well.”

“A major issue that I do not point out directly in this presentation is the high energy cost of supporting the elderly in the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. One issue is the huge amount and cost of healthcare. Another is the cost of separate residences. These costs can be reduced if the elderly can be persuaded to move in with family members, as was done in the past. Pension programs worldwide are running into financial difficulty now, with interest rates rising. Countries with large elderly populations are likely to be especially affected.”

(3) Humanity at a Turning Point

“In the previous chapter, it was posited that the declines of civilizations are cyclic and that they have more to do with the shifts of the ages (when the spirit of an age shifts) than with factors related to resource declines, environmental degradation, or climate change, although all those factors would play a significant role too.”

“On a personal level, humanity’s turning point could be understood as a return to Self. In Western terms, this would refer to the Jungian concept of Self (it’s not the ego-self), meaning an inward turning towards one’s own authentic personal center, in order to truly know thyself. (This was explored in some detail in an article titled The Keys to Conscious Co-Creation).  On a social and cultural level, a return to cultural traditions and community values could be expected to become more important again, while spirituality and religion are likely to make a comeback too.”

“From a metaphysical perspective, the energies of centralization and decentralization ‘flow’ in opposite directions to each other, but one is usually stronger than the other. Centralization is clearly still the current dominant directional energy flow.” 

“One type of logic, which would be to change direction and to decentralize, would then find itself contrary to a logic that would prefer to keep on centralizing. It’s worth reflecting on the fact that the universe itself ‘orders’ this scenario by way of expansion energetically turning into contraction, while duality is in a state of amplification at the same time.”

“An Age of Centralization  The world today is largely dominated by international perspectives due to the endurance of globalization. This has, over time, resulted in a high level of centralization; probably the highest achieved in history. As a result, it could be said that the entire globe today, more or less, constitutes an empire. This modern global empire has come about as a result of long-term globalization and globalism.”

“In the last chapter, it was mentioned that empires would tend to want to preserve their centralized format even when they are facing constraints to further expansion. Empires operate according to centralized mindsets that are set on expansionism based on a sense of manifest destiny. An empire state of mind is a state of consciousness that has its own drive. Empires typically do not change course, because they are set on a course.”

“Centralized thinking tends towards standardized thinking. That happens due to central demands for uniform compliance with standardized methods, because simplification is needed for managing everything from within a center out to its peripheries.  For the sake of simplification, centralization doesn’t want to be concerned with too many details. One can see then how centralized thinking has its own logic; thinking from the perspective of centralizing everything in order to manage and control everything better from a central position. Centralized thinking naturally leads to the logic and the logistics of centralization.”

“When centralized and standardized thinking are constantly emitted and promoted from within a center outwards to its entire sphere of influence, more or less across-the-board, uniform thinking could eventually result. Thinking for simplification; thinking for standardization and thinking for uniformity could become the norm. That could mean a loss of differentiation, a loss of inspiration and a loss of creativity, not to mention a decline in free thinking. Under such soul-stifling conditions, there would hardly seem to be any need for creative or inspired thought.”

“On the other hand, the greatest advantage of a decentralized system is that it is much more resilient overall. When one part of it fails, other parts can continue more or less unhindered. In a centralized system, if one part fails, it can destabilize the entire system.  For a system to be properly decentralized, it would need to be differentiated, decoupled, and diversified. It would also require innovative and creative thinking with the freedom of implementing innovative solutions independently and locally.  Most nations are still locked into a variety of international mechanisms that make it very difficult for them to take decentralized approaches in the face of global crises.”

“The implication, in a nutshell, is that for as long as the world remains so comprehensively globalized, truly decentralized solutions are, for the moment, somewhat limited. It is mainly possible only on a very small scale, meaning on the individual, family, or community level.  That said, in some quarters, it is believed that globalization has most likely already passed its peak [38], even though there is still a lot of momentum behind it. One could, therefore, suggest that what should be aimed for on a personal level – as far as thinking is concerned – is an urgent re-balancing of thought processes with an orientation towards finding localized solutions in anticipation of a changing paradigm.”