Homeostasis

Today I was thinking about the maypole and about society and about Temasek and thinking about the elites and thinking about how delided and pathetic they were when the word homeostatsis appeared in my brain.

And i knew something about what homeostasis is - hoe a living organism balances itself out - and I know something of what a perfect ecological system looks like - having been in a primary rainforest. And I know how children and people can be brainwashed into doing things against their self interest - and it struck me that...

The problem with the world - well the neoliberal model is that everything has to be biggered. If you are not biggered then you are not winning. I was talking to an ex-colleague the other day and she said she thought that environmental charities had lost their way trying to also scrmable to the top of the pile - and we both agreed with not a lot to show for it. And this biggering has been the drive of human beings for some reason, since people were able to climb in chariots and stab each other to death. Power and wealth has always been synonymous - rewatching The Last Kingdom with the protagonist just trying to head into what used to be his homeostasis - getting his own back - is incredibly deeply frustrating.

But, the point is that, there has to be a floor and a ceiling to what should be acceptable. What is enough. The problem is that the lack of the floor is directly linked to the lack of a ceiling. This is what Marx was talking about of course - that everything needs to be equal. But equality has a totalitarian ring to it. In an ecological system there is no equality, there is homeostasis. Every element plays a very important role - the dung beetle's function is as important as the trees as the mycelium, as the leopard, etc. But we are not animals who live chained to our habits. We can create something which is humane and homeostatic in nature. This means that there are floors and ceilings and when we are trying to push the ceiling further up, we have to think about the consequences it will have.

Take air travel for instance. Previously there used to be Economy and First Class with Business Class in between. Now Economy is Premium Economy with the exact same service and economy has dug one below. And there is now - well there is now private jet for the truly superrich. instead of there being a basin model which means that things drain to the middle - which is the model of a pond or a lake, you now have a slope. A one sided slope - with the richest at the bottom where all the wealth drains and the poorest left stranded on the top. And those on the slopes are trying their best to stay where they are... And all the time the richest are digging below and eroding the top of the mountains. 

We are now at a point in history where the people who are stranded at the top are falling off it to their deaths - to become the fodder for the rich. The rich are the bottom feeders.

And by this I mean the superrich. 

And yet they maintain some weird belief about themselves are successful. You are not successful until everyone else is successful. You are pat of an entire ecosystem. If the ecosystem is collapsing you could be apex predator but sooner or later - you are going to die.Increasing inflation rates are a pathetic sort of hemeostasis and the constant refrain of taxing the rich is also another one, but the truth is that these are old fixes. Banks can now just create money out of thin air. They are entirely over leveraged but no one knows by how much. It is all dots and flashes.

Being in an elite institution of education now is meritocracy of the serpent eating its tail. People are there because their parents could afford to put them on the path there. These places are now filled with the cream of society - rich and thick. In the meantime the best thinkers are left out in the cold... to rot. Everyone has a role to play but those who have been brought up privileged have a fallen idea of what this means - it is the caste system all over again.

What is the solution? I know the solution but the people who can effect it will not because they are as brainwashed as the people who are impacted by it and believe that this is how things will always be. I saw that during the pandemic as well. How people were convinced to behave even though it was against their best interests. 

If we can decide what homeostasis looks like in a functioning and thriving society then we may have a blueprint that goes somewhere.. in the meantime it looks like we are condemned to repeat the fall of Atlantis over and over again.