Not everyone recognizes that addiction can appear in larger systems and in other guises — such as the dependence of industry on government subsidy, the reliance of farmers on fertilizers, the addiction of Western economies to cheap oil or weapons manufacturers to government contracts. Thinking in Systems Pg 131
We want our systems to be resilient, to not break at the first sign of strain. These types of systems have many feedback loops that balance each other out1, sometimes restraining the actions of another part of the system and sometimes enhancing these actions so that two parts of a system can restrain a third part. This is hard to see though because when a system is resilient it just keeps working with only minor bumps that affect few. As with many things a system works to right itself in the face of erosion then it suddenly collapses as the resilient feedback loops can no longer hold the strain and fail all at once.
Resilience is at odds with Productivity
For a system to be resilient it almost always needs to be complex, with many parts interacting to bring equilibrium to the whole. You can see this in the quest for capitalism to capture and monetize creativity2. If something is too creative, it’s bad…but mostly because it can’t be monetized by the wider system. In the creative realm wild and crazy things are often precursors to new movements that a generation later are tamed enough to be heralded as a turning point in the art world.
It’s can be hard for humans to break out of this quest for productivity and the boundaries that places on what we accept. We are attached to our boundaries3 and have a hard time seeing actions and others outside those boundaries as similar to us. We call people new to our country immigrants as a way of turning them into others that aren’t part of our ingroup of citizens, which makes it easier to treat them in ways we would never want to be treated ourselves.
Economics built on addiction
Meadows talked lots about how our unchecked growth is a bad thing in every realm but business4. Wild growth in the human body is often cancer. In the wider world it’s often an invasive species which overwhelms all the checks built up over generations of evolution that should keep everything in balance.
Our current system of economics lets companies grow in part by allowing them to push their costs onto the commons, our public service systems5. Gig workers can be paid extremely low wages because we have social services that can step in and provide the food they can’t afford via food banks or food stamps.
Past companies could continue to grow and make profits because they dumped their toxic by products into water supplies. This forced cities to deal with the sick people and degrading environment while the companies reaped profits and made billionaires by stealing money from the public.
This was a main theme in Dark PR as well. Ennis points out many places that we subsidize industries to our own detriment. We support the oil and gas industry6 so that consumers have lower prices, at the expense of an environmental bill future generations will have to pay. We even see some of the affects now with record heat waves, tornados, and wild fires. These are signs of system collapse, but we still keep the subsidies up.
Where do you see systems overwhelmed?
I can think of many other places I see system collapse. I if most of you scrolled through your local news site you’d find a bunch as well. So, where do you see system collapse and what are you going to do about it?
