A Human Behaviour Crisis?

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 you 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 of that paper, which asserts:

“While human behaviours were implicit in the various world scientists’ warnings, we believe they need explicit attention and concerted emergency action in order to avoid a ghastly future.”

I believe this is absolutely correct.  For decades, world scientists have stated that human behaviours had to change, but they insufficiently examined the driving 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 that exploitation?  Why have those behaviours been exploited?  Obviously, a select fraction of the population profited from it, but can we really assume that some kind 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 the identification of a human behavioural crisis, the perpetrators and values driving that exploitation need explicit attention, and that may well lead to a different concerted emergency action.

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

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

I accept that each and every species has an innate drive to increase their population and expand into as much territory as possible – to grow, occupy, and consume.  In a system of negative feedback where each life form is ultimately consumed by others, a drive to increase population is necessary to offset risk factors and ensure a continuance of presence.  (Any species that lacked sufficient capability for that would have disappeared long ago.)  The drive to occupy territory corresponds with the needs for an increased population.  As for consumption, it is one of the basic conditions (if not definitions) of life.

The critical element in all of this is the concept of sufficiency.  There are peak values for growth, territory, and consumption, after which benefits to the individual life form 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 energy is 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 planet of finite resources.  A never-endingly increasing value does not exist anywhere in nature.

The measure of any resource value to any life form therefore expresses a qualitative value – one that depends on context and marginal utility.  More is not always better.

And yet, what if a higher species created another kind of value 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 is always 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, even though all of the material things exchanged for it are.  Monetary wealth can be created from absolutely nothing (and is – as debt), and does not lose numeric value in transactions.  Being just a number, the potential value expressed is theoretically limitless, and it can exist virtually – it does not require material objects to back up that value.

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

a)      Who (or what) is behind that exploitation of behaviours?

b)      Why have those behaviours been exploited?

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 impulses listed in the paper – the ones that those entities are leveraging for their own gain:

• 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, subject to peaks, sufficiency, and negative feedback loops.  Also consider the simple imperative of procreation.  The mathematics of population growth often produces exponential curves, but that is never the whole story.  Steep curves are brought down with equal speed by overcrowding, disease, food shortages, and increased predatory populations.  In nature, explosive growth always creates the circumstances required for that growth to collapse.  The same mathematics can be applied to unfettered economic growth – the major differences being that there is no limit to the potential monetary wealth, and there is no inherent negative feedback built-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 to reduce negative feedback (e.g. food shortages) and thus delay and evade the consequences of surpassing natural limits.”

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

I propose that, from economic, ecological, and sociological perspectives, corporations must be considered as a separate species and treated as such for the kind of work that we do.  They have full status as legal persons and increasingly claim rights created for humans, and they operate indepen­dently of their creators in almost all respects.  Furthermore, this is a species that is not subject to any natural laws of sufficiency, that can grow to any size, and has a theoretically unlimited lifespan.  Most importantly, this species is entirely based on a quantitative value system that is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, 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-traded commercial corporation.

It is impossible to state with certainty that the technologies that we have today would have eventually appeared, regardless of the 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 overshoot is inextricably tied to the singular quantitative value systems of commercial corporations.  To push civilization to the brink that we currently teeter on, it is necessary to have blinders to a great deal of evidence of self-destructive behaviours – evidence and warnings that go back hundreds of years.  The ability of monetary wealth to trump all other human and ethical values is the just 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 civilization was 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 to empirically identify, but the difference between measuring success by quality or measuring it by quantity (where more is always worth more) is crystal clear.  It is not that one value system is good and the other is bad.  The point is that if society gives number-based values practically unlimited power to trump every qualitative human value, we are headed for a guaranteed disaster – and ecological overshoot.

For example, when you can translate limited resources into a limitless value, impervious to decay, and do so in such a way that the resulting scarcity drives the value of additional consumption even higher, that is a positive feedback recipe for resource annihilation.  If we’re looking for clues as to how humans circumvented natural negative feedback mechanisms, it seems to me that basing much of society on value systems that freely create and leverage exponential curves without any hindrance from natural laws and limitations would be 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.