The Oil Drum

On edit:

Ah, now I get your point. I agree that the barriers to action are all human factors. I also agree that around here we focus on the technical aspects of our problem set. I disagree with any suggestion, though, that the solution set is or even could be likewise technical. All the evidence before us indicates that the box we're in is of technical construction, and simply applying more technical tinkering to it will merely redecorate it, not tear it open.

The focus on technical solutions is yet another inevitable manifestation of our dualism - a clever-monkey response illustrated in this article:

Faustus and the monkey trap

One of the factors that make the crisis of industrial society so difficult to deal with is the way that crisis unfolds out of the most basic assumptions we use to make sense of the world.

Albert Einstein’s famous dictum about trying to solve a problem with the same sort of thinking that created it has rarely been so relevant. Notably, many of today’s attempts to do something about peak oil rely on the same logic that got us into our present predicament, and turn out “solutions” that promise to make our situation worse than it is already.

Of the dozens of good examples in the daily news, the one that seems most worth noting right now is the economic blowback set in motion by the US government’s attempt to bolster its faltering petroleum-driven economy with ethanol. As corn and other grains get diverted from grocery stores to gas tanks, commodity prices spike, inflation ripples outward through the economic food chain, and the possibility of actual grain shortages looms on the middle-term horizon. More than twenty years ago, William Catton pointed out in his seminal classic Overshoot that the downslope of industrial society would force human beings to compete against their own machines for dwindling resource stocks. His prediction has become today’s reality.

It’s all very reminiscent of an old metaphor in cognitive psychology. Many centuries ago in southeast Asia, some clever soul figured out how to use the thinking patterns of monkeys to make a highly effective monkey trap. The trap is a gourd with a hole in one end just big enough for a monkey’s hand to fit in, and a stout rope connected to the other end, fastened to a stake in the ground. Into the gourd goes a piece of some local food prized by monkeys, large and solid enough that it can’t be shaken out of the gourd. You set the trap in a place monkeys frequent, and wait.

Sooner or later, a monkey comes along, scents the food, and puts a hand into the gourd to grab it. The hole is too small to allow the monkey to extract hand and food together, though, and the rope and stake keeps the monkey from hauling it away, so the monkey keeps trying to get the food out in its hand. Meanwhile you come out of hiding and head toward the monkey with a net, if there’s a market for live monkeys, or with something more deadly if there isn’t. Far more often than not, instead of dropping the food and scampering toward the safety of the nearest tree, the monkey will frantically keep trying to wrestle the food out of the gourd until the net snares it or the club comes whistling down.

The trap works because monkeys, like the rest of us, tend to become so focused on pursuing immediate goals by familiar means that they lose track of the wider context of priorities that make those goals and means meaningful in the first place. Once the monkey scents the food in the gourd, it defines the problem as how to get the food out, and tries to solve the problem in a familiar way, by manipulating food and gourd. When the hunter appears, that simply adds a note of urgency, and makes the problem appear to be how to get the food out before the hunter arrives. Phrased in either of these terms, the problem is impossible to solve. Only if the monkey remembers that food is of no value to a dead monkey, and redefines the problem as primarily a matter of getting away from the hunter, will it let go of the food, get its hand out of the trap, and run for the nearest tree.

So, if the solution can not be technical and a variety of hard-wired psychological factors keep us from even assessing the problem domain rationally, we're back to square one. Any solutions can only apply to very small subsets of the population: those that can recognize the danger, have the resources to respond as well as the will and freedom to respond in time, and can cope psychologically with the implications of their own personal survival in the midst of a general collapse.