narrative collapse

Layers of organization in our communities include those that look: (a) outward from the boundary of individual families including matters of social hierarchy i.e. politics, (b) inward from the boundary of culture including sports and religion, and (c) outward from the boundary of culture including the guidelines for many professions. In this context two effects on narrative, that reduce its effectiveness, may be expected to occur especially when resources are scare.

One of these effects is that narrative on levels (b) and (c) may be trivialized to level (a) thinking, i.e. politicized. This for example happens with different groups when the topics of inequality and climate-change come up, with the result that the structural problem and consequences underlying these things end up being ignored.

The second effect, that works hand in glove with the first, is our tendency to think of causes as organismic, i.e. to explain problems in terms of bad guys and good guys, rather than in terms of natural processes in a world which will always be sending us new challenges. As a result, we have a tendency to react to real effects in the world around by focusing on a personality soap opera that has little to do with the problem itself.

How can we fix that?

income & offspring

Eric Chaisson has argued that community-level health (e.g. as measured robustly by task layer multiplicity) is linked to free energy per capita. This is expected to peak (and perhaps has peaked in some places) as our environmental impact builds and as our population continues to grow.

Although wealth imbalance clearly hurts community-level health, arguments for blind redistribution are well-known to put incentives (i.e. natural selection pressures) in the wrong place. In steady-state, income should be linked with contributions to community-level health e.g. to the nurturing of subsystem correlations (especially one's own) that look in & out from the boundaries of skin, family and culture.

How to do this in the face of pressure from defectors (this is part of human nature) will always be a work in progress. But it does mean that sustainable-incentive based resource distribution, which limits population growth as well as sequestration of resources in a tiny fraction of the population, is part of our challenge now and in the future.