(*) You remember that bit in the Permaculture Designer’s Manual in the beginning about connecting up the chicken as a component in such a way that it can provide a lot of useful functions by just living in a context which is stress-free as it is close to its co-evolutionary one? This is the way of thinking resulting from the “problems often are symptoms of confusion about something fundamental” approach – the Fukuoka approach, basically. In contrast, the “conflict-oriented thinking” approach also “optimises” the design, but with respect to a very unwisely chosen objective that leaves many important aspects out of the equation. Essentially, it leads to ideas such as optimising with respect to conversion efficiency only, hence feeding antibiotics to chicken so that the bugs healthy animals have (and need) in their intestines get killed and do not compete with the chicken organism for calories. Of course, such “optimising” will give the single clear-cut answer to a single clear-cut question, but: is it the right question to be posed? Even if we only included the issue of breeding antibiotics-resistant diseases into the analysis, this would completely shift the picture.

(*) Another extremely important issue about orthodox economics: what we see right now is a situation that may be at the brink of bloody riots in some countries that suffer from the financial meltdown. People are angry at the very same politicians they elected. Why is this? I think it is extremely important here to pay very close attention to our built-in mechanisms of self-justification. As the population cannot accept having made major mistakes, they need a scapegoat, and for sure, it is the politicians.

Concerning climate change, once we, the
population (and I deliberately include myself here, for reasons that should become clear from what I’m saying) see how dramatic the situation *really* is by now, facing the truth won’t be easy to every one of us. So, the natural reaction will be to find scapegoats. Now one does not have to look further than to William Nordhaus’ book “The Economics of Climate Change”
(which won a prestigious prize in 2005) to discover that our collective planning was based to a very large degree on our economist’s thinking, which is just full of very fundamental and obvious errors far beyond any imagination. Once this happens, people will start a massacre and the whole world will drown in blood.

The only way I see in order to prevent this is to teach people about self-justification, cognitive dissonance, other forms of cognitive bias, and the scientifically well-established built-in “software bugs” of the human mind, and fast. The only possible way forward is a constructive approach which starts with the idea “if we as a society could not make sure such enormously dangerous nonsense does not make it to the planning stage but gets thrown out early on, then this means we all failed, and to some degree are responsible for, this horrific mess.”

Neoclassical economics may take much of the blame, but so does every scientist who learned about this and looked away rather than ensuring that the academic process eliminates such nonsense. (I personally actually am an active academic and in fact do work towards making the huge errors in these “scientific publications” widely known.) And so does every journalist who learned about it and did not write about this. And so does every citizen who did not take the time to check whether our economists’ ideas seem anyhow reasonable and allowed this madness to continue. So, we really are all responsible for this, maybe to a varying degree, but unless we learn to accept that we cannot just unload the blame on the economists, we will go down the road of civil war and total annihilation, rather than the road of “how amazing to live at the time when the biggest blunder of our species’ entire history got cleared up: We have been so VERY wrong, but more important than taking revenge and killing those people responsible for destroying the young generation’s future is to actually get the problems sorted out. We have to collectively talk about self-deception, and once we understand it, everybody must face one’s very own.” So, we have to invest collective effort into educating people about what self-deception has made of us, and got us into, and we must ensure every single person who manages to discover their personal share of guilt is treated with highest respect. Our biggest problem is that our western culture did not really evolve a collective concept of honoring the ability to *overcome* self-deception above anything else. Prestigious prizes should not go to people who can point at having found out very clever things, but to those who manage to admit and see the true mechanisms underlying their most extreme forms of failure.

It is out of the question that quite a lot of published work done by economists such as Nordhaus has to be reclassified as “unscientific due to deep conflicts with the most obvious immediate observations”. But it is also out of the question that the only viable way to get there is to employ the engine of self-justification to our advantage, rather than having to fight it. Essentially, this is what Gandhi’s non-violent strategies boil down to: Every person has to retain a positive self-image – many would rather die than giving it up. Hence, the way to sort out problems is to ally with this engine of self-justification in the opponent by persistently pointing at the problems while never using violence, but kindness even when confronted with violence. All that the utilisation of even the slightest bit of violence manages to achieve is to give the opponent’s engine of self-justification a handle to explain to itself why it also has to resort to violence. Thanks to the engine of self-justification, human beings would probably stand a better chance trying to resist gravity than to resist getting into an enormously serious inner conflict by fighting somebody who persistently keeps on responding with kindness, while still sticking to their point – which after all suggests it must be more important than one originally thought it to be.

Gandhi called it “non-violence”. The problem with this term is that our culture does not understand the true nature of violence, so trying to stick a label to a most profound idea which tries to define it in terms of the negation of something we do not understand either will not be met with much success.

Hence, we need a better term for Gandhi’s idea. Rather than “non-violent struggle”, or “Satyagraha”, how about using some notion that is intriguing because it is outrageously paradoxical? My own suggestion would be: “Organic Warfare”.

This discussion taught me some important things:

(1) Many economists seem to suffer from the problem of not being able to understand a process such as SADIMET, believing that by coming up with a (questionable) suggestion, they did in fact manage to “solve the problem in a way that turned out to work” – not being able to distinguish between a plan and its implementation. I identify this as one major reason for the mess we are in: Many planners neither really know what a “model” is, nor what a “plan” is, nor what the role of “assumptions” is.

(2) Maybe you know the saying “if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Economists are trained to think in terms of “conflicts of interest”, and helping people to “make decisions” by giving them “more freedom” to weigh one thing against another, where a “useful tool” is “monetarization”: If everything is expressed in monetary terms, this gives the individual maximal “freedom” to achieve X by deciding whether to cut back on A, D, and F, or A, E, and H. The problem with such “conflict-focused” thinking is that it misses a very important point: Nature is like a big jigsaw puzzle we only understand very partially. The pieces are made to fit – to the greatest extent, co-evolution took care of that – and we have to use clues from paying attention to detail in order to find out what works and what does not. If we try to make something work which cannot, we will get feedback in multiple ways that something is wrong – high energy requirements, loss of nutrients, species loss, social unrest, etc. Whereas the sane approach would be to find the root cause of these problems and address that, people schooled in conflict-oriented thinking will not try to address multiple symptoms symultaneously by solving the core problem, but instead find ways how people get the “freedom” to choose whether they rather want to invest effort into “fixing symptom X” or “fixing symptom Y”. It is precisely this form of stupidity which leads to patently absurd ideas such as “protection of the environment is something that needs effort, so it will be the easier the stronger our economy is, for if we have the capacity to satisfy many needs, we also will have a strong capacity to care for the environment – and hence, ‘we need high economic growth to save the planet’”.

(3) Education is a key issue. People will not be able to make good decisions unless they know a bit about the true role of some key resources. Literally, we have the “freedom” to rape the soil, but if we do so, in the end, the soil will rape us, even in the precise sense of the word. What do we think brutal armed conflict, with organized mass killings, mass rape, and all its atrocities comes from? Destruction of the natural resource base easily leads to such forms of destruction of a civilization.

Table 20.14: Average N, P, and K Balances, kg/ha/yr, of the
Arable Land in Several African Countries Projected for the Year 2000

Such negative balances (inputs minus outputs) represent a literal mining
of African soils that simply must be stopped if the quality of all life
on this continent is to be sustained.

Balance, kg/ha/yr
Country Nitrogen (N) Phosphorous (P) Potassium (K)

Cameroon -21 -2 -13
Ethiopia -47 -7 -32
Ghana -35 -4 -20
Kenya -46 -1 -36
Malawi -67 -10 -48
Nigeria -37 -4 -31
Rwanda -60 -11 -61
Senegal -16 -2 -14
Tanzania -32 -5 -21
Zimbabwe -27 2 -26
Average -39 -5 -30

From Stoorvogel, et al. (1993)

Stoorvogel, J.J., and E.M.A. Smaling, 1990. “Assessment of soil nutrient
depletion in SubSaharan Africa: 1983-2000. Report no. 28 (Wageningen,
Netherlands: Winand Staring Centre for Integrated Land, Soil and Water
Research.)