Abundance - Steve Pavlina and Marcus Aurelius

In 1814 Napoleon was in trouble.  He had been defeated in Russia in 1812 and was now facing the invasion of France itself by the allies.  He was forced to abdicate.  Was this because he had lost his spirit?  Hardly.  He was still the driven military genius he had always been.  He still had the command of large numbers of troops and was not short of equipment or ammunition.  And thanks to the Louisiana Purchase, he had plenty of money.  Everyone should have a large chunk of a continent to sell if you are a bit short of cash.  But there was one thing he was short of that nothing could replace quickly enough.
He had lost huge numbers of horses in Russia.

Without horses he had no cavalry, and no means of transporting the supplies for his army.  Without the power of horses he simply could not fight on.  Until the modern age, almost all motive power came from men or animals.  So even if you were Napoleon with the resources of most of Europe to draw on, there were limits to what you could do.  Napoleon was able to move his army around remarkably quickly by the standards of his day, but even so he wasn't any faster than the Romans 2000 years before.  And if you were short of horses there was nothing that could be done to make good the deficiency.

But in the century after the fall of Napoleon the whole picture was transformed.  The exploitation of first coal and then oil has created a world where power and movement are cheap.  If you want something from anywhere on the planet you can get it.  Fossil energy removes constraints that have been part of history.  With unlimited power available to anyone who has the money to pay for it, the value of money itself has been enhanced.   Money can buy you nearly anything.  But that power is only given to it by oil.

The ability to tap energy out of the ground has been truly amazing and it has pervaded our experience in a way that is hard to overestimate.  No other species needs to worry about being overweight.  Obesity is one of the downsides to abundance.  But on the whole abundance makes things better.  With oil powered machinery few people are needed to produce our food.   Most people can concentrate on other beneficial activities.  There are more scientists around than there have ever been inventing new technologies.  We have artists and musicians making work to suit every taste.   We now expect cars and computers to improve every year.  In fact everything gets better all the time.  At the Olympics next year in London we are already confident that records will be broken.  Freed from the necessity of working to produce necessities we can specialise  in more and more things and get better and better at them.

Constant improvement and a reliably better future is a relatively new concept, and a concept that is one of the products of the oil age.  Not many of us read medieval literature anymore, but if you did you find that they regarded themselves as the lesser sons of greater fathers.  You can get the idea pretty well if you read the works of  J.R.R.Tolkien who was a medieval scholar.  In his books things start off good and gradually go to pot.  You get the same story in the Bible with the fall of Adam.

But the idea of progress and abundance go hand in hand.  Steve Pavlina's belief in abundance is in some ways his most conventional and mainstream idea.  It is as central to his thinking as it is to august bodies like the World Bank and the IMF.  They describe it in the terminology of economics.  All economies are supposed to grow by so much every year so long as they follow the prescriptions of the free market.   But when you think about it the commitment to continual economic growth is a pretty mystical idea.  It relies on an unspoken assumption that money measures everything, and that the amount of wealth as measured by money can continue to increase.  And so long as there is abundant energy allowing plenty of mobility this assumption isn't too far off the mark.  Before oil when you described a country's wealth you would need to talk about its agriculture, its ports, its ships, the skills of its craftsmen.  Now we can reduce all that to a number.  We can do this, because oil makes one form of wealth easily transferable into another and because it removes the physical limitations to the accumulation of wealth.  A modern banker can earn as a bonus in a single year the kind of wealth that in a previous age would only have been obtainable by gathering a large group of barbarians and ransacking an entire civilisation.  

And the whole idea of personal growth fits neatly into this world without limits.  When it comes to abundance, Steve Pavlina has drunk deeply in the well of the abundant world created by cheap readily available energy.  He has never really acknowledged this until his most recent post.  But in this post he shows that he is well aware of the black viscous material underpinning of his beliefs.

Oil is going to run out.  It may wreck the planet via global warming first of course, but either way the path we are currently on is not sustainable.   As a species we need to change course soon one way or another.  We don't know what will happen, but one possible outcome is that the world of abundance we enjoy might be lost.  We might once again be facing a world of scarcity.

Steve's response?  He decides that scarcity is the Universe's way of teaching us lessons.  When he was short of money it made him realise that he didn't need money to live a good life for instance.   And now that he has money, he appreciates it all the more for the experience of being without it.  He loves computers and the internet, but he could be just as happy without them. 

Can we enjoy abundance in a world of scarce resources? Of course we can. Scarcity is one of our best teachers. It steers us away from false paths and teaches us what real abundance means to us. We don’t need more money or success or iStuff to be happy. We can choose to feel grateful for what we value most, and through that feeling of gratitude, we can empower its expansion.

This attitude is very much a throwback to the stoic philosophy that was so popular just before the rise of Christianity.  The arch exponent of stoicism was Marcus Aurelius.  Marcus Aurelius himself lived in a world of scarcity, though as the emperor of Rome he was not personally in any danger of going hungry.  He wrote his famous meditations for his own benefit with no idea that they would still be being read centuries later.  In fact his instructions were that they should be destroyed. Luckily they were kept and we can compare Marcus to Steve.

Think not so much of what thou hast not as of what thou hast: but of the things which thou hast select the best, and then reflect how eagerly they would have been sought, if thou hadst them not. At the same time however take care that thou dost not through being so pleased with them accustom thyself to overvalue them, so as to be disturbed if ever thou shouldst not have them.

So like Steve, Marcus values what he has but is philosophical about the possibility of losing it.

Marcus Aurelius was certainly familiar with the sense of loss. In his reign the empire was afflicted by plague that carried of his brother and many of his children.  But he was also faced with barbarian invasions that threatened the existence of the empire itself.  He was hardly a warlike man, but he did his duty by leading the army against the enemy.   How would he have coped with the threat of global warming or oil depletion?  I suspect he would have felt that it was something he should actively work to prevent.  But for him it would have been done to conform to the spirit of virtue.

Steve's approach is that yes, oil is running out, but that doesn't mean you have to abandon the mindset that goes with a world of abundance.  After all, you probably don't appreciate all the good things you have now.  Maybe going without will give us a better appreciation of what we had.  Its all about cycles after all, and it is a natural feature of the Universe to cycle from one thing to another.  He isn't particularly interested in taking action to tackle the problem because the changes will be a good learning experience for all of us.  But on the other hand, perhaps the process of solving the environmental and economic problems might be a valuable learning experience.

In either case,  what is important is the effect of a particular course of action on how you see and experience things, rather than what you actually achieve.   Where most of us see a possible risk, Steve sees a challenge and an opportunity.

Its a refreshingly different perspective.  Its completely bonkers of course.  The world doesn't work in cycles.  There are cycles in nature, but they arise from well understood physical processes.  Personally I am an optimist, and I think that we will solve the problems ahead and continue our world of abundance and even be able to welcome far more people in to share its fruits.  But I don't know the future and I can't discount the possibility that things will go horribly wrong.  We all have a duty to do what we can to prevent this.  The weird thing is, I think I find treating the problem as a challenge much more motivating than treating it as a duty.