There Is No Planet B
19th December 2018
Kim Stanley Robinson is an award-winning science fiction author and, like many such these days, a proglodyte.
If, however, we change our technologies and our economic system to better match the physical and biological realities of life on Earth, the resulting history could be quite amazing, what some are calling “a good Anthropocene.” That future would, in effect, be the story of humanity devoting itself to nurturing the health of the biosphere and creating a sustainable prosperity for all the living creatures on this planet. While not exactly utopia, that future could be called optopia—the “optimal place,” the best possible outcome given the current conditions.
Like many such, he has a conceited notion of how much control human planning has over human activity, and th monomaniacal desire to make everyone conform to his vision of the future that afflicts all Social Justice Warriors.
Like many such, he is fundamentally deceived by the Aggregation Fallacy, that there is some universal ‘we’ out there and that all ‘we’ have to do is decide that unicorn farts exist in order for them to magically appear.
An economic system is a complex interaction of the many components that compose it, and in particular the components who are intelligent and self-aware. It never occurs to people who want to ‘change our economic system’ that there might be parts of that economic system that don’t want to make those particular changes, and that they are perfectly placed to spend their days frustrating those changes in order to achieve self-centered personal goals. Markets work even when you try to distort or destroy them. Planners never seem to learn that simple truth.
Technology is something that occurs when it can occur, and it spreads and becomes permanent when social conditions are right for it. Humans have known about the power of steam since Hero of Alexandria, but it wasn’t until 1800 years later that the social matrix was in place to make steam power effective. Once that matrix was in place, however, the spread of steam power was inevitable. We can’t ‘change our technologies’ any more than we can change our economic system, precisely because they depend on multiple interactions of self-conscious agents who may (and often do) have a different agenda.