Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures Vol. 1

A story about Earth’s most successful modern creature – the human being. But Earth’s most successful modern creature is now in a predicament; a predicament brought about by a compelling combination of vital human traits and our (relatively) recent discovery of vast stores of fossil flammable fuel. Human’s recent discovery of flammable rock and liquid in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas has temporarily turbocharged humanity’s energy use and biomass. This “Carbon Pulse” is a brief period of geologic time in which all the carbon fuel stored up over hundreds of millions of years is expended in just a few centuries. The resulting impacts on wealth, economies, and ecologies are Earth shattering. Humans are reaching the end of the carbon pulse. Now we face a time of change that requires a quality of systems thinking and future planning never before required of our species.

You read this from a tiny spot in our enormous galaxy where energy, matter and deep time have converged to create something wholly greater than energy, matter, and time; as life—once simply created—has invested billions of years in continually re-inventing itself, attaining qualities we are only beginning to understand and appreciate. And wonder of wonders, we are related to all of it and all of them, brothers, sisters and cousins; no known life in the universe is outside of this close family. We bring to this creation a self-regarding consciousness—learning, slowly, to understand ourselves and our family, while the more primitive, automatic and powerful parts of our same minds unintentionally collaborate in its destruction.

We are starting to recognize that we are individually and collectively held back by unexamined assumptions and illogical “feelings” about how things seem to be, but the reality is we have huge individual and cultural “blind spots.” Ergo, we are ‘reality blind’. Yet this same knowledge of “who we are” gives us at least some power over it. While the path to a profoundly wonderful human future is difficult, it is not yet foreclosed. This will be the century which tests the human potential for mediocrity against the human potential for greatness.

There are plenty of science books out there describing the current plight of humanity – what makes this one different is: Breadth: This is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary synthesis of the human predicament. We cover everything from deep time to cognitive biases to the fossil carbon monkey trap and integrate dozens of subjects that have bearing on the issues humans will face this century. Many core insights are not be about certain topics but derive from the integration of certain topics. A longer-term view: Most analysts advocate policies to adopt in the next few years or perhaps decades, with no real longer-term context. We look deep into the coming decades (and beyond)—attempting to wend a path towards the larger prize—a long-view aspiration for human existence (which optimally is long term maximization of human achievement, experience and happiness, minimization of suffering, and co-existence with other complex life in a healthy environment). A neutral starting point: We have friends and colleagues from all walks of life.

The story in the pages that follow applies to all of us: the problems we face are not really anyone’s fault, yet we are all complicit in and now responsible for rectifying them. We hope to build bridges across typical demographic labels and spur conversations on what a sapient species might aspire to beyond our current cultural directives. In the following pages, we will give short overviews of scientific themes central to our thesis that humans are in a predicament, and how we might alter the default path. It is hoped that our work will give you a greater grasp of the complex challenges facing humanity this century, as well as inspiration on how to live meaningful, effective and enjoyable lives.