In September, 2023, a group of authors, led by Joseph Merz, put out a peer-reviewed paper that captured significant interest in the world of ecological economics.  The paper is titled “World scientists’ warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot”.

It immediately caught my attention because, in line with my own thinking, the paper proposed that looming disasters like climate change and the loss of biodiversity were just symptoms of a bigger problem.  Instead of trying to fix symptoms, a far more effective strategy for humanity is to track down the causes and explore solutions to those.  I hope that, by now, we can all accept that human behaviours are behind our most serious threats to species continuance.  This particular group of authors suggested that this human behaviour crisis was driven by the intentional manipulation of innate adaptive behaviours.  Specifically, Economic Growth, Marketing, and Pronatalism (encouraging population growth) were being used to exploit populations into behaving in ways that were ultimately not in humanity's best long-term interest.

[If you are curious about the details, I encourage to read the paper for yourself.  For an academic work, it is a fairly easy read.  It also proposes a solution, which I found intriguing but less compelling.]

This short reactive exploration builds on the content ofthat paper, which asserts:

“While human behaviours wereimplicit in the various world scientists’ warnings, we believe they needexplicit attention and concerted emergency action in order to avoid a ghastlyfuture.”

I believe this is absolutely correct.  For decades, world scientists have statedthat human behaviours had to change, but they insufficiently examined thedriving source of the maladaptive behaviours in the first place.  My graphic image above summarizes the premise nicely.  I want to now take this exploration one step deeper.

Who is holding the hammer?

This post asks:  Who (or what) is behind thatexploitation?  Why have those behavioursbeen exploited?  Obviously, a selectfraction of the population profited from it, but can we really assume that somekind of all-trumping wealth-maximization motivation is innate in all humans?  Answers such as “greed”, “wealth”, or “power”might be implicitly assumed, however, I fear they are untested.  For all the same reasons behind theidentification of a human behavioural crisis, the perpetrators andvalues driving that exploitation need explicit attention, and that may welllead to a different concerted emergency action.

The paper hints very slightly at a factor where my own personalresearch began:

“Like other species, H.sapiens is capable of exponential population growth (positive feedback) butuntil recently, major expansions of the human enterprise, including increasesin consumption and waste, were held in check by negative feedback – e.g.resource shortages, competition and disease – which naturally curbed continuedpopulation growth.”

I accept that each and every species has an innate drive toincrease their population and expand into as much territory as possible – togrow, occupy, and consume.  In a systemof negative feedback where each life form is ultimately consumed by others, adrive to increase population is necessary to offset risk factors and ensure acontinuance of presence.  (Any speciesthat lacked sufficient capability for that would have disappeared longago.)  The drive to occupy territorycorresponds with the needs for an increased population.  As for consumption, it is one of the basicconditions (if not definitions) of life.

The critical element in all of this is the concept ofsufficiency.  There are peak values forgrowth, territory, and consumption, after which benefits to the individual lifeform invariably cease, to be replaced by negative outcomes.  I suggest that there is nothing in the‘natural’ world where More is ALWAYS Better.  There are peaks and limits.  Furthermore, it could be argued that energyis the ultimate expression of value, but energy cannot be created from nothing,and entropy takes its cut of every transaction. We exist in a world subject to the laws of thermodynamics, on a planetof finite resources.  A never-endinglyincreasing value does not exist anywhere in nature.

The measure of any resource value to any life form thereforeexpresses a qualitative value – one that depends on context and marginalutility.  More is not alwaysbetter.

And yet, what if a higher species created another kind ofvalue for itself – one measured by number, where (within that value system)more is always better. Such a quantitative value system has no concept of sufficiency.  This is what I propose humanity has done,with the creation of the concept of virtual (monetary) wealth.  Within a monetary system, more money isalways worth more than less.  In 1926,Nobel-laureate chemist Frederick Soddy (in Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt)pointed out that money is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, eventhough all of the material things exchanged for it are.  Monetary wealth can be created from absolutelynothing (and is – as debt), and does not lose numeric value intransactions.  Being just a number, thepotential value expressed is theoretically limitless, and it can existvirtually – it does not require material objects to back up that value.

This takes us back to the two significant questions that thepaper raised for me:

a)     Who (or what) is behind thatexploitation of behaviours?

b)     Why have those behaviours beenexploited?

I suggest that the driving forces behind this exploitation would not be possible, or at least anywhere near as influential, without humanity’s adoption of an overwhelming precedence of number-based (quantitative) values.  The predominant overarching goal of the entities (be they individuals or corporations) is an increase in monetary wealth.  This is not a ‘natural’ value.

Contrast this goal, for example, with the human impulseslisted in the paper – the ones that those entities are leveraging for their owngain:

seek pleasure and avoid pain; acquire, amass and defend resources from competitors; display dominance, status or sex appeal through size, beauty, physicality, aggression and/or ornamentation; procrastinate rather than act whenever action does not have an immediate survival benefit particularly for ourselves, close relatives and our home territories (humans are innate temporal, social and spatial discounters).

I suggest that all of these are qualitative values, subjectto peaks, sufficiency, and negative feedback loops.  Also consider the simple imperative ofprocreation.  The mathematics ofpopulation growth often produces exponential curves, but that is never thewhole story.  Steep curves are broughtdown with equal speed by overcrowding, disease, food shortages, and increasedpredatory populations.  In nature, explosivegrowth always creates the circumstances required for that growth to collapse.  The same mathematics can be applied tounfettered economic growth – the major differences being that there is no limitto the potential monetary wealth, and there is no inherent negative feedbackbuilt-in to that growth.  (Most importantly, what if climate change is the negative feedback that has been inevitable from the beginning?)

According to the paper:

“Fossil fuels enabled us toreduce negative feedback (e.g. food shortages) and thus delay and evade theconsequences of surpassing natural limits.”

This is quite true, and there is no question that the ModernTechno-Industrial (MTI) civilization that followed has been a major contributor toour exponential population growth and the resulting ecological overshoot.  However, I propose that our ability to reekhavoc upon our environment is due to more than just the capability of ourtechnology to outpace human evolution. Something is still amplifying the incentives for that technology anddefining the destructive principles used for its implementation.  Moreover, humans are not alone at thepinnacle of the pyramid.  There isanother significant player in this narrative that hardly gets a mention in thepaper – corporations.

I propose that, from economic, ecological, and sociologicalperspectives, corporations must be considered as a separate species and treatedas such for the kind of work that we do. They have full status as legal persons and increasingly claim rightscreated for humans, and they operate indepen­dently of their creators in almostall respects.  Furthermore, this is aspecies that is not subject to any natural laws of sufficiency, that can growto any size, and has a theoretically unlimited lifespan.  Most importantly, this species is entirelybased on a quantitative value system that is not subject to the laws ofthermodynamics, so they can create ‘tangible’ value from nothing.  And even though this value system is man-made,it is unhindered by human morals or ethics. We programmed them this way! This, I believe, is an accurate description of the public-tradedcommercial corporation.

It is impossible to state with certainty that thetechnologies that we have today would have eventually appeared, regardless ofthe participation of corporations in an MTI society.  Still, I argue that the pace of technology,the uses of technology, and the impact of technology on our ecological overshootis inextricably tied to the singular quantitative value systems of commercialcorporations.  To push civilization tothe brink that we currently teeter on, it is necessary to have blinders to agreat deal of evidence of self-destructive behaviours – evidence and warningsthat go back hundreds of years.  Theability of monetary wealth to trump all other human and ethical values is thejust the thing to provide those blinders. After all, “it’s nothing personal – it’s just business”.

This is why, 20 years ago, when I asked the same “Why?”questions as did the researchers for this human behaviour crisis paper,I concluded that human behaviours were based on values, and what civilizationwas experiencing is a value crisis.

Human Behaviour Crisis or Value Crisis?

This is not just a rewording of exactly the same concept.  Good and bad behaviours can be difficult toempirically identify, but the difference between measuring success by qualityor measuring it by quantity (where more is always worth more) is crystalclear.  It is not that one value systemis good and the other is bad.  The pointis that if society gives number-based values practically unlimited power totrump every qualitative human value, we are headed for a guaranteed disaster –and ecological overshoot.

For example, when you can translate limited resources into alimitless value, impervious to decay, and do so in such a way that theresulting scarcity drives the value of additional consumption even higher, thatis a positive feedback recipe for resource annihilation.  If we’re looking for clues as to howhumans circumvented natural negative feedback mechanisms, it seems to me thatbasing much of society on value systems that freely create and leverageexponential curves without any hindrance from natural laws and limitations wouldbe a great place to start.

In addition, it is imperative that the role of corporations be included as an integral part of any search for solutions to the human behavioural crisis.  This is not just because of their phenomenal impact, but because, in the words of Yuval Noah Harari, public corporations are myths – they exist only on paper, and operate under arbitrary values and laws that we established in their entirety.  That proves that theoretically we could change any of those factors, and thus change those entities overnight. Such changes might not seem practical or likely right now, but those probabilities will change if/when we accept that civilization, as we know it, might be on the line.

Yes, I agree that human behaviour has been meticulously, psychologically (and mathematically) exploited.  This has been so effective and well-established that we are not only dealing with entrenched flawed perspectives – we also have gross examples of hedonic adaptation on a cultural scale.  Despite unprecedented population numbers, a large portion of the planet also consumes more energy, more materials, and more residential square footage per capita than ever before.  How can generations of people living this lifestyle ever be expected to voluntarily scale back?

I used to believe that the only mechanism possible to provide a paradigm shift of sufficient significance would be some kind of catastrophic system collapse.  I now believe that there is great potential in (re-)emerging policies like a Universal Basic Income, which severs the umbilical that our MTI society instituted between survival and the job-imperative, allowing people to view money, time, and lives in an altered light.