Fealty to the abnormal
Accepting contradictions that define a climate impasse
There is no lack of advice for wish-making when one comes upon a genie. More wishes. More genies. World peace. The Buddha-wise approach: “I wish for no more wishes.” Faux-clever: “I wish to be smarter than the trickster genie.”
By now, we know that the wishes come at a price hidden until it’s far too late. It’s all about loopholes, ambiguity and super tiny unread print. Specialized genie lawyers are, when you boil it down, just regular-folk contract lawyers anticipating how their clients might get screwed, if not first by the lawyer.
Humans are drowning in that sea of might-could potentialities — a paralyzing level of hell. It’s not where we started. We live now with the unintended consequences — the unknown costs — of choices made forever-ago.
“I choose the safety of a group of fellow travelers” seems, in the end, to be a choice to live with contradiction.
“I wish for only intended consequence” probably comes at the price of discovery – not intended, of course, but it would have been stricken from the list of possibilities in the first place.
“I wish never to need” likely comes at the cost of love.
We spend a lot of our Bank of Nature conversations trying to puzzle out the riddles of how we — eight billion Earthlings with our accumulated knowledge, technological prowess, creativity and vast economic engine — arrive at today’s crisis-burdened lived experience from our lived human history.
It’s okay, we say resignedly, to coexist with nightmares of our own making.
Humans didn’t wish for a climate dystopia, but their ancestors made a choice that created this unforeseen consequence. We see the fall out. We lament it. Then, we do something curiously counterintuitive: We defend the nightmares and even double down on the ways to make them scarier.
If the human-accelerated climate crisis is the existential threat of our time, where is evidence of our instinct for self-preservation?
I, for one, am flummoxed by contradictions that persist even when they are revealed. Humans knowingly and willingly accept what would otherwise be unacceptable. I wish to understand why.
I’m reminded of a childhood day playing in the yard with a new friend. We were harmlessly boisterous as kids are — but loud enough to irk the parents. My new friend’s father yelled, angrily from a distance, “Child, come here! I want to slap you!”
I leave it to you to consider whether the child complied. Why and to what end would he? How should the bystanders have reacted? What was the penalty had he not complied?
This troubling parent-child relationship, all too common, helps to explain one of the baffling incongruities we hear often at meetings with even the most rage-filled climate activists: “Government is to blame for the climate impasse and only the government can solve it.”
In other words:
I distrust the government for its inaction on climate, but I trust more of that same government will attend to the crisis.
From the sources of our safety and security, humans need more than what can be provided. We may even see that our guardians are not up to the task, but we still want them to rise to the occasion, anyway. It’s what a parent should want to do. It isn’t what the government — a referee — is designed to do.
We want the circle we asked for to remake itself into a square.
At Bank of Nature, like anyone trying to make sense of this bizarre lived experience, we are still searching for the inverting wormhole that translates fiction as fact, wrong as right, unreasonable as reasonable. It’s safe to say the cipher is not where logic lives, but where humans do.
Childhood trauma is one codebreaker, but we are well-versed in other frameworks that invert logic and aren’t normally applied to our relationship with climate.
Putting aside the merits of our argument, Bank of Nature proposes a technical “work around” that sidesteps the confounding, protracted and slippery climate log jam. We have defined a problem. We have provided a plan to relieve us of that problem with the tools we already have on hand. It’s functional, practical — and, maybe even inspired — problem solving. We call it the safer alternative path.
“Here’s an untried, nontraditional way to see and resolve the climate crisis differently. We say it’s viable. Help us prove it. Join us to implement a fiduciary economy that has the human values of caring, loyalty and fairness baked in as legal standards, not unmet aspirations.”
Eureka!
Not so fast.
Our proposal's credentials in logic are pretty good. It answers Einstein’s theory of insanity. It’s not sentimental — which is not the plus I thought it would be. Like other big ideas, Bank of Nature does not yet offer a way to shed the millennia of intergenerational psychic hurts that interfere with people’s interest in actually choosing differently. “Drink your juice, Shelby.”
So, when we say the government is ill-suited to lead on climate and that there is a “right-sized” role for the government in participating in what might otherwise be done — it thuds. “If not the government, then who?” is heard not as an invitation to get creative, but as a threat. Then, we get to marvel at the Stockholm Syndrome embedded in the abusive status quo that turns its harshest critics simultaneously into its staunchest defenders.
The status quo is evil, but I demand it to surprise me.
This is what we mean in our observation that, with climate and other extranational planet-scale crises, we’re leaving the problem solving in the hands of the problem maker. There is no evidence in history for this kind of hope from the government, but it’s unkind to say out loud. Tough love is meaningless to people unloved. It does nothing to unwind the riddle of contradictions. We have to figure out a way to work with it, nonetheless.
The duty to manage abundance
My collaborator
says that human society doesn’t know how to manage abundance. For example, we are good at collecting tens of trillions in retirement savings, but terrible at deploying those trillions in ways that will produce a dignified retirement.Admittedly, it has taken me a while to see how this idea might be the missing link in how we choose this way of living over another, less caustic, way of living. However, the primordial ooze has, indeed, missed an important piece of coding: That deprivation and surplus are on a spectrum and interrelated. They are not, as basic drivers, one or the other.
Trust, love, empathy and other human-scale qualities that we bemoan as absent in our lived experience, especially at planet scale, were never part of the earliest organizing efforts. The first decisions, back in the caves, would have been made by necessity and instinct. It was never about feeling. It was about feeding, however feebly. Today, we have the benefit of hindsight. We have science. We have a sense of humanity that is allowed to flourish only when necessity is met — and, still we choose this lens of privation.
Not all of us, of course. Humans, at least some of us, have developed a worldview that has no currency in how we run the world. In that way, we are all starving artists: penalized of self-expression in order to get food on the table. We’ve satisfied one need to create another.
Rather than thinking this is a new problem fomented by our regular cast of villains — human moral failings, greedy CEOs, corrupt politicians, capitalism, neoliberalism, privilege, geopolitical frictions, mindless growth, man’s inhumanity to man — the beginning of the end was the minute we had more than enough.
This structural nonsense is as old as we are. We get to live with the earliest choices and their aftermath. It does not excuse the bad actors acting badly, but it does suggest why it seems impossible to make new choices based on new necessity and new instinct.
The deal was food, not feelings
Nature provides biology — even humans — with defenses against danger. Instinct: “Run for your life”. Ouch, don’t touch! Leukocytes. Spidey sense. After that, we’re on our own.
While a few of us solitary types will forage for whatever bananas the seasons provide, we are more likely to form alliances through which we rely on one another to boost our collective survival. It’s not a love connection. It’s ruthless self-interest.
Still in the caves, we start to organize human packs. This allows for skills specialization, the division of labor and individualism. The cave's thinker Maslow says, before anything else, we need food, shelter, air to breathe and the basics procured to a minimum threshold so we can raise viable offspring.
Good idea. If you hunt, I’ll gather bananas, he’ll paint petroglyphs, she’ll carve wheels and discover fire, the guards will secure the perimeter and Alpha, the person in the big hat, is in charge.
Not to be confused with symbiosis, which is nature’s way of putting two creatures together for mutuality, collaboration is an order removed from nature. It is a human-made social agreement — a social engineering marvel that does not occur in nature — through which two humans who might not otherwise be connected agree to work together. It’s the terms and conditions of that agreement that the status quo upholds even today when the terms are inadequate to reflect modernity.
Reliance on another human to do that job we expect for our mutual gain is the earliest incidence of faith and we can only guess how soon after that faith was tested. By agreeing to collaborate, we do X to partake in Y, even though we didn’t create Y. The penalty for failure is extinction.
This works beautifully when there are just enough bananas to share. It starts to fail when there is an abundance of bananas. We know how to get bananas. We don’t know what to do with extra bananas.
With no rules to manage abundance, we default to the original scarcity-thinking. It stalls Maslow’s quest for Level 2 “ safety and security”, which remains elusive. It makes "love and belonging", Maslow’s aspirational Level 3, a cruel fantasy.
Society is not a pack of like-minded humans. Society is unequal distribution within a pack based on fossilized rules of expedience. It’s not a blueprint for living well. It never has been about quality, as much as we might think it ought to be, but quantity. Society is not a parent. It does not love you. Society is built for resource extraction — and, on that front, it is operating a peak output. Anyone who doesn’t seek that is, actually, the problem.
The myth of normal
Physician Gabor Maté calls this dissonance The Myth of Normal in his recent book (co-written with his son Daniel Maté) that reveals the vivid connection between pervasive trauma in a toxic global culture and physical illness.
Anyone without some level of trauma, he says, is an outlier. Climate anxiety, for example, is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. There is nothing normal about living under constant threat or knowing how this climate story ends when the status quo, despite our vocalized concerns, hastens that end.
“From a wellness perspective, our current culture, viewed as a laboratory experiment, is an ever-more globalized demonstration of what can go awry,” he says. “Amid spectacular economic, technological, and medical resources, it induces countless humans to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.”
Our brains are scrambled by dissonance, anger, fear and powerlessness that are completely normal reactions to an abnormal situation. In the world as is, “what is done” and “what should be done” are ideas that are accepted as incompatible. That discord, in practice, negates new ideas like ours. It explains why people who I think should (“should” used advisedly) be clamoring all over our proposal, dismiss it as unworkable — because it’s normal to accept that nothing works.
“An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists,” says Maté. “Our beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building.”
Lest you think this is all about shaken baby syndrome, our species lives with other frameworks that explain contradiction.
The great cosmic and philosophical swing of enantiodromia suggests, for example, that fiction is part of fact and fact is part of fiction. “Everything is “pregnant with its contrary,” writes Marx. If truth is absent now, then the order-chaos ouroboros will bring it back, as night turns to day and then night. Is human extinction inevitable by dint of the long ago Galvanism of cells that could divide?
Menacing doublespeak, jargon, gaslighting and other language mangles our perceptions. High school mathematics introduces us to the additive inverse. Wrong + right = 0. In multiplication, -1(fiction) = fact, -1(wrong) = right, -1(unreasonable) = reasonable.
In earlier grades, we learn to read between the lines. In the art studio, we acknowledge the tension of meaning in the voids between unrelated objects in a still life. It’s the potential that lives in the limbo between collaborating art and science where, in a Third Paradise, the distinctions between supposed opposites don’t matter.
What if we sold our souls as the price of admission to a “safety” club that doesn’t value souls?
In following difficult questions to answers no matter how byzantine or discomfiting, we can evaluate and recalibrate our Bank of Nature approach to up our success rate in building bridges and launching a “safer alternative path.” The hard part is to let the emergent answers speak for themselves without making them fit a popular framework of supposed knowing or dismissing them because we don’t like what they tell us.
That's unexplored territory. That’s where these aggravating, nonsensical inversions make sense. That’s where there are the answers to questions we have yet to ask.
That’s hope. If people are looking for comfort from a system of organization never meant to provide it, all is not lost. Rather, there is everything to gain.
1 + 1 can equal 3.
I don’t like it, but I don’t have to spend precious hours debunking it. We all know it is wrong, but there are plenty of realities where that equation is correct.
Likewise, I can’t explain away scarcity thinking nor its impacts with logic, without giving equal weight to its contrary. Therein is the additive inverse that resets the scale back to zero. Therein is the opportunity we have yet to take with Bank of Nature.
I want us to write the rules of abundance for our time. That’s where our fluency in contradiction rings true.
There is a very real schism between what society gives and what people might want instead. Actually, it is a Russian Doll of nested schisms — meaning that you can’t address one without addressing all of them. That evokes the image of a laser-cutting tool that transects all the layers.
Thankfully, we have that precision tool. It’s fiduciary duty. Granted, it suffers from bad branding that does not yet instill the confidence that it can fix anything and everything at once.
One example: We gave away our agency — when we didn’t know it was important to us — to a system of compliance that reduces us to inputs and outputs. Had we known that sufficiency would allow room for self-expression, we might have rethought the limitations of scarcity in favor of the promise of abundance. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Bygones won’t buy back our agency, but fiduciary duty can negotiate that return of property — right now.
I am even more confident that our fiduciary duty initiative is the most exciting new idea to understand our society’s relationship with nature, to our fellow humans making their way through The Economy and the future.
It is simple, but not easy.
It is present, but invisible.
It sits within the system, but can change the system — with the scale to matter.
It is a trust, but doesn’t require trust.
It is not designed to feel better. It protects what you value.
It doesn’t pretend to be something it is not.
Fiduciary duty is refreshingly unambiguous and big enough to carry as much inconsistency as we can throw at it — because it is immune to anything that is not part of its recipe of available actions. The brilliant part is that you don’t have to agree with me. Fiduciary duty will defend your idea of up, even if the whole world says down.
Plus, fiduciary duty has already granted your wish for a remedy that unravels an impasse. No tricks. It’s at will call and ready for pick up. I know I feel better.