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Underlying everything we do, including the social systems we build, is human psychology. Our actions depend on the way we think about the world and our place in it. So, what ideas in human psychology explain why we create systems that tend to become snafus? I take a light-hearted stroll through ideas about “reality” to try to find out.
As I do my research, I keep coming back to the role that energy plays in human systems. Our social progress was limited when our main sources of energy were our own labor and the energy we took from animals, whether from eating them, or using them as beasts of burden, or as a means of transport, or, in the case of whales, to provide light and heat by burning their oil. When we used wind and water, and when we burnt wood, this was an improvement, because these were sources of “free energy.” Human civilization really took off, in a material sense, when we found an absolutely massive source of free energy— when we started to burn nature’s stockpile of fossilized plants, carbon in the form of coal and hydrocarbons in the forms of oil and gas. This happened not long ago. The Industrial Revolution began in England around 1750, powered by coal. Without coal it couldn’t have happened. Around 100 years later, when whale oil began to become scarce, the hydrocarbon age began and, along with it, the age of electricity, super-charging the Industrial Revolution and pretty much all social change since then. From around the 1770s, the development of human society was not just fast, but exponential. It accelerated as never before, thanks to fossil fuel energy. This was a game changer for humanity. But, in the 1970s, economic growth stopped accelerating and began to flatten. The rate of return on energy began to decline. This coincided with the dawning of a sense that our economic progress had become based on a kind of “pump and dump” attitude towards the earth—take its energy and other resources and dump the waste from the things we made with them. It turns out that there’s no such thing as free energy. There’s always a cost. I have a name for the 200-year period from the 1770s to the 1970s. I call it the ‘Accelerated Age.’ In the final chapter of the book, I examine how the energy intensity of the ‘Accelerated Age’, and the overlooked costs of burning the fossil fuels that powered it, contributed to the snafus I discuss. And I ask whether there’s a way out, or whether “snafu” is as good as it gets. Then I suggest that there might be a way out. I don’t offer any solution for the snafus—just a few thoughts about an approach to solving them. My aim is to provoke a discussion. I’d like you to read the book and tell me what you think. Seriously, I’d like to know. [4] The first use of the word is thought to be in 1941 or 1942. There is an interesting discussion on the origins of the word here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/68954/researching-the-real-origin-of-snafu. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU
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