by Stephen L. Doll
Published in: Northwest Technocrat Newsletter, No. 123, April 1994
How many times have we done something, perhaps based on false or insufficient information, and said, "Golly, I wish I hadn't done that,'' or maybe, "Well, I'll know better next time.'' Next time, of course, we will be more informed and capable of making a better decision.
Our social system and its vast baggage of concepts, mores and folkways is the product of many thousands of years of blundering along in ignorance, superstition and misinformation, partly to protect the social status of those in power, but primarily because people just didn't know any better.
Our present form of economy is based on the same elements. It was formulated in the days when resources seemed limitless and humanity, having just tasted a sample of proprietorship with the end of the feudal system in parts of Europe, was experiencing the rudiments of the credo of the insatiable incentive system: nothing is worth doing unless some gain (usually in the form of the acquisition of goods) accrues to the doer. It was also formulated in the days of ignorance.
Only in fairly recent times can we see the revelation of the grand-daddy of all processes on earth and the rest of the universe: the Laws of Thermodynamics.
When the Second Law of Thermodynamics was officially assigned the more user-friendly moniker "entropy'' in 1868, the United States was already on a resource roll, fired by expansionist philosophy and an inexorable adoption of resource-gobbling technology. The control mechanism of money that, fair or not, allotted the benefits of technology to a select few and thereby limited resource consumption, fell by the way when sales-hungry industry foisted the miracle of installment buying on an otherwise empty-pursed working population.
Only in 1933 when Howard Scott, late Director-In-Chief of Technocracy, defined economics and a standard of living in terms of the rate of the degradation of energy was the link between scientific principle and social welfare made a matter of general public knowledge. The industrialists promptly suppressed it, preferring to relegate scientists to their ivory towers to toil away in meek servitude to their paychecks. In cloistered isolation they plied their esoteric trades and kept their secrets, bribed with the good life and separated by specialization, to insure competition between their employers for a corner on the market and competition between themselves for prestige and grant money.
Now the information age is upon us with a mind-boggling array of data that, in our antediluvian mindset, we just can't absorb. Unfortunately, the very speed of technology seems to be feeding upon itself, demanding more technology to control it and placing us farther behind in our ability to grasp it. And the thing that sticks most in our craw is that we can no longer operate with business as usual by consuming resources as a means of accumulating piles of intangible debt.
Entropy, simply put, states that in a closed system with limited resources, we cannot keep converting them to usable forms forever. (Sorry, Limbaughites.) The oil that is used to power turbines that generate electricity and appears to us as heat and light from our reading lamp will never be usable as oil again (at least not for a couple hundred million years, when the organic material that makes up the reader becomes the oil.) When we replant an old-growth forest, the trees will be of poorer quality. You can't copy a copy and have it come out as good as the original.
The Law says that every bit of energy or resource we use, we can get back in less usable form only. The earth does not pay interest like a savings account; it depreciates in utility. Yet, strangely enough, we use an elastic and intangible financial system based on a strange and frankly irrational melee of philosophical concepts to control the development and distribution of physical resources.
As Jeremy Rifkin states in his book, Entropy, A New World View: "every technology ever conceived by the genius of humankind is nothing more than a transformer of energy from nature's storehouse. In the process of that transformation, the energy flows through the human system where it is used for a fleeting moment to sustain life (and the artifacts of life) in a no equilibrium state. At the other end of the flow, the energy eventually ends up as dissipated waste, unavailable for future use.''
Rifkin continues: "The next time a technician, politician, or businessman tells you he or she can eliminate the secondary problems associated with a particular program, product, or process with better planning or better leadership or better design, think about the second law. It is true that the secondary disorders caused by a particular technology can be temporarily solved by the application of new technology. But the solution will inevitably result in even greater disorders.'' In other words, step on the lump in the rug and it pops up somewhere else. Use your other foot to step on the other one and two more pop up across the room.
And entropy doesn't affect just our degradable resources. We are currently witnessing social entropy--the decline of relationships between people, directly related to dwindling resource bases. Economics has always been the primary basis for war and strife whether between two people competing for a job or two nations competing for a resource. The social degradation in North America and throughout the world stems from either a contrived or actual shortage of resource distribution: in resource-rich areas, to increase trade values and promote a social system based on inequity; in resource-poor areas, due to ignorance, overpopulation and philosophical hang-ups.
Scientists have long known that we can't continue our present course but, as Jerome Deshusses observes in The Eighth Night of Creation: "the scientific researcher is the perfect hireling.'' They have known for years that money is not a resource but a matter of opinion, but they need their salaries. Attempts have been made to make something scientific out of money by assigning it mathematical properties. Mathematician Ted Thoren, in his The Truth In Money Book, bravely attempts to demonstrate that money can be explained in mathematical terms. In reality, nothing from nothing--or plus, times, minus, divided by, cubed, squared, sliced, diced, or whatever--equals nothing. As far as meeting physical needs, numbers are abstracts unless they are counting or measuring something. And money has never done either.
Had we known about the Law of Entropy when we stumbled onto this Continent, would we have handled things differently? What if we had based our policy-making and distributive mechanism on hard, immutable fact rather than on vague, imponderable concepts like freedom, democracy, the dignity of toil, and the misguided notion that people must be incessantly and exponentially bribed with sweetmeats to get them to do anything worthwhile (Price System preservatives, one and all).
With the tremendous amount of knowledge at our disposal now, are we handling things differently? Apparently not. To support our value system, born in ignorance, we in North America continue to degrade energy as if there were no tomorrow. And there may not be many more tomorrows, at least for Homo sapiens.
Modern alchemists, breasting an overwhelming tide of fear and suspicion, tinker with converting sows' ears into silk purses at a molecular level in a mad scramble to synthesize new wonder compounds or replicate others--desperate cyclists in a race against consumption, feverishly trying to shore up the bicycle with untried parts as it collapses beneath them. Theorists talk of abundant resources and ``free'' energy (remember nuclear power), little realizing that the last thing business wants is anything free and abundant that can't be hoarded by the strongest and doled out at tremendous profit.
Meanwhile, the ``right'' to consume massive quantities and the ensuing degradation continues. The fat man gluts himself, depending on miracle diet drugs untested for side effects, to burn off his fat cells so he may continue to glut. The band plays on. Dorian Gray whirls in a madcap waltz of waste while the portrait on the wall--the real essence of his being--falls into decay.
The topsoil erodes. Nuclear wastes build up. Species disappear by the hundreds. The landfills fill. The lofty mahoganies of the Amazon Basin, accessible thanks to a new superhighway, topple beneath a troposphere pall of smoke. Bevis and Butthead stab each other with pencils and burn the couch.
The buildup of the military machine escalates with no enemy in evidence except our own inefficiency. Pollution, the byproduct of converted resources, is everywhere. And the wealthy wall themselves off from the vast majority of the world's population (expected to double by the year 2025) that lives just at or below the most niggardly of subsistence levels.
And we all grow progressively dysfunctional, physically, mentally, or both, because it's just too big and fast for us. The meek escape into the comforts of less-complicated times (thereby creating another market for the consumption of nostalgic bric-a-brac, log homes, and other collectibles), the aggressive escape into streets and stadiums. And both retreat into the nostrums of alcohol and drugs and remain perversely proud and protective of the part they play in producing the consumer goods we will throw away, use to kill, or stuff ourselves with. The most revered and heeded in matters of policy is the most consumptive.
More often than not, we can't reclaim that goof or faux pas we made. We can only learn from the experience and hope to use the knowledge to avoid making the same mistakes.
Will we continue to blunder and plunder along? How many times will we murmur, ``Oops! Better not do that again.''? As for the future of humanity on this planet, the Law of Entropy only allows so many ``Oopses.''
Our present way of thinking is the product of thousands of years of depleting resources and moving on. The last century and a half of technological progress has left us with little opportunity to further such adventurism. Scientists eye celestial bodies with plans of mining them and erecting structures such as huge solar panels. All this seems very remote in a social system that measures any venture in potential dollar return and is beset by an endless array of problems because of it. Unless we realign our method of governing resources and the society dependent on them, respective of natural laws and based on the distribution of a measured plenty to all citizens, the words of the next to the last person on earth may very likely be, ``How much?'' and those of the last, ``Maybe we shouldn't have done that.''
