Which brings us to the present and the cycles and waves that have yet to reach the concluding third act, where the dramatic climax leads to resolution.
We can discern cycles and waves in the past and posit them in the present, but not the outcomes. A great many phenomena follow cyclical patterns, from sunspots to Peter Turchin’s 50-year cycle of human history, while others form waves.
“Cyclical rhythms are fixed and regular. Their periods are highly predictable. Great waves are more variable and less predictable. They differ in duration, magnitude, velocity, and momentum. One great price wave lasted less than ninety years; another continued more than 180 years. The irregularities in individual price movements make them no more (or less) predictable than individual waves in the sea.
Even so, all great waves had important qualities in common. They all shared the same wave-structure. They tended to have the same sequence of development, the same pattern of price relatives, similar movements of wages, rent, interest rates; and the same dangerous volatility in later stages. All major price revolutions in modern history began in periods of prosperity. Each ended in shattering world crises and was followed by periods of recovery and comparative equilibrium.”
Examples of waves range from rogue waves in the sea to bond yields / interest rates which arise and decline over periods of time that vary too much to qualify as cycles but match the dynamics of waves described by Fischer. Bond yields have gone from peaks to troughs in less than 20 years to the recent span of about 40 years–at the outer duration boundary of previous interest rate/yield waves.
In other words, the cycles described by historian Peter Turchin (50 year cycles that can generate 100-year, 150-year and 200-year cycles), along with many other cycles–the business cycle, the Kondratieff credit cycle, the Debt Super-Cycle, etc.–are defined not solely by time but by their internal dynamics and measurable qualities. Waves and cycles share many of the same dynamics and are easily confused.
As Fischer observed, waves of human history share characteristics with ocean waves, which can accrete energy and become giant rogue waves that cannot be predicted even as they can be foreseen as recurring phenomena.
I posted a list of dynamics currently accreting in self-reinforcing feedback loops last January:
Both waves and cycles tend to follow the dynamics of S-curves in which a trend takes off in a boost phase, matures into a peak and then decays or reverses.
What cannot be discerned are the consequences and outcomes. An economic cycle or wave might culminate in an excess-clearing recession that sets the stage for an ultimately positive rebalancing of risk and debt, or the outcome might be an excess-clearing Depression that lays waste to the entire status quo.
Two cycles have attracted much commentary over the past decade:The Fourth Turning posited by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (subtitled What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny) which laid out an 80-year cycle of four generational turnings (High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis) that culminate in a system-changing Fourth Turning.
This 80-year cycle aligns with the nation-changing crises of 1781 (the end of the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States), 1861 (the start of the Civil War) and 1941 (America’s entry into an existential global conflict, World War II). This cycle suggests a nation-changing crisis began around 2021.
Strauss and Howe took pains to note that the outcome of each crisis isn’t pre-ordained to be positive. Complacency based on the idea that it will all turn out wonderfully due to the nation’s destiny could be fatal.
Peter Turchin and his colleagues have mapped out a 50-year cycle based on data ranging from archeological to financial–or in the case of coin hoards buried in times of crisis, both archeological and financial. Turchin’s prediction of a crisis beginning in 2020 drew skepticism which then flipped to recognition when the events of 2020 came to pass.
The previous era of crisis centered around 1970, a period that includes the latter half of the tumultuous 1960s (assassinations, the war in Vietnam) and the world-falling-apart early 1970s, which featured an energy crisis and deep recession, the reuniting of Vietnam by the North, crushing inflation, the resignation of a president who had won re-election by a landslide, a Constitutional crisis and an extended period of domestic terrorism that included hundreds of bombings and the kidnaping of heiress Patty Hearst–an era documented in the book Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.
Since I lived through this period, I observed the importance of context when defining the outcome. To those who had benefited from (and grown accustomed to those benefits) the postwar era of 1946 to 1963, the changes in culture and the zeitgeist were dismaying: crew-cuts and college sweaters gave way to long-hairs in hippie garb, music went from Guy Lombardo and Henry Mancini to psychedelic rock, those who chafed under the social and economic limitations of the previous era sought a wider range of opportunities, and the nation that was united by war in the 1940s was shattered by war in the 1960s.
To many in the older generations, this era inspired a desire to return to the good old days of relative stability and conformity to long-established norms. But to those chafing under the limits of social, political and economic hierarchies, this was a period of liberation.
Not all good, by any means, but also not all bad–depending on where you stood.
Which brings us to the present and the cycles and waves that have yet to reach their concluding third act, where the dramatic climax leads to resolution.
Will we get a controlled burn that sets the stage for regrowth, or a conflagration that burns down the entire status quo? Many reckon the present will extend seamlessly into the 2040s, while others see 2026 as the spark igniting a multi-year conflagration.
To the degree that everything from the Global Financial Meltdown in 2008-09 to the present has been artifice masking moral decay and the terminal rot of Anti-Progress, it seems unlikely that we’ll be afforded the luxury of another decade to extend the second act of Ultra-Processed pretense and speculative extremes.
We can discern cycles and waves, and the arrival of Act Three, but not the outcomes, as the outcomes depend on our responses to forces in play that may well veer from linear and controllable to nonlinear and uncontrollable, at which point something different from what we planned and expected happens
An observer on Triskelion is taking the nonlinear side of the what-happens-next bet: Provider One wagers five thousand quatloos that AI will destroy its own Thralls.
We are living through a period of profound misallocation. Enormous amounts of money, energy and material are still being poured into activities that only make sense in a growing economy. In a post-growth world, many of these investments cannot deliver what they promise. When financial bubbles burst, they do not so much destroy value as reveal that the value was never there in the first place. The damage was done earlier, during the period of optimism, when malinvestment was mistaken for progress.
This problem is sharpened by the growing divide between two economies. The real economy, grounded in energy, materials, food and labour, is already contracting. The financial economy, by contrast, continues to expand through debt, speculation and asset inflation. These two trajectories cannot coexist indefinitely. When money grows faster than the physical systems that support it, trust in money itself begins to fail. A fracture in the financial system is not a distant possibility. It is a structural outcome.
When that fracture occurs, even basic questions become difficult. How will trade function if trust in money collapses? How will essentials be exchanged? Modern economies depend heavily on imports, not only of discretionary goods but of energy, food, minerals and components. No country is truly self-sufficient. A breakdown in financial systems therefore becomes a breakdown in physical supply chains.
At the same time, consumerism continues to place excessive demands on the planet. Energy use remains high. Resource extraction continues. Environmental damage accumulates. Yet the ending of consumerism is rarely discussed in practical terms. How do societies adapt when consumption must fall, not by choice but by necessity? This is not simply an economic question. It is a social one.
Inequality adds another layer of instability. Wealth and power have become increasingly concentrated. These inequalities are not accidental, and they will be fiercely defended by those who benefit from them. As pressures increase, the gap between what systems can provide and what elites seek to preserve is likely to widen, not narrow.
Competition for scarce resources is already reshaping global relationships. The old assumptions of stability, cooperation and rules-based order are weakening. This is not an aberration. It is a predictable response to scarcity. Managing this process peacefully will be one of the hardest challenges of the coming years.
Climate change intensifies all of these pressures. Rising temperatures, disrupted food systems and extreme weather are already driving migration. These movements will grow. Attempts to manage them through borders alone will fail, because the underlying causes are structural.
Taken together, these trends point to a future defined less by growth and more by adaptation. The central task is no longer how to expand the system, but how to manage contraction without collapse. That requires honesty about limits, a rethinking of trade and money, and a shift towards more local, materially grounded forms of economic life. The alternative is not stability, but unmanaged breakdown.
What to do? I will sit back and watch. Apart from ridding ourselves of debts, there’s nothing we can do until the powers-that-be recognise that growth has ended. Then we will be able manage our own moves into localism.
A recent article on the website Our Finite World explores what people can do as the global economy becomes more fragile and conflict becomes more common. It argues that falling energy supply, rising extraction costs, growing debt, and the increasing complexity of modern life point towards a long period of contraction. The article can be read here: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/06/18/what-should-individuals-do-in-a-world-filled-with-conflict
In this uncertain environment, the author suggests several practical steps for individuals.
Be thankful for what you have now We are still living in conditions that most people in the world would regard as fortunate. We have a wide choice of food, warm homes, and access to services. It is helpful to recognise this rather than constantly wanting more.
Keep away from conflict As cheap energy declines, global supply chains and long distance trade will become unstable. This may lead to tension between countries and within countries. Individuals gain little from being drawn into political or physical conflicts. It is safer to stay clear.
Expect simpler living and fewer goods The complex systems we rely on may not last. High tech medicine, electronic equipment, imported goods, and replacement parts depend on global supply chains. These systems may fail or become unreliable. We should adjust our expectations and prepare for a simpler life.
Rethink saving for retirement If the economy shrinks, there may be fewer goods and services available in future years. Money may lose value. The traditional idea of saving for retirement may not make sense in a contracting economy. Many people may need to work for as long as they are able.
Live in shared or extended households if possible Sharing space lowers costs. Larger households mean shared cooking, shared heating, and shared help with daily tasks. Living with family or trusted friends may provide greater stability in difficult times.
Avoid taking on large debts The article argues that the economy has produced too many people with long and expensive educations for the number of jobs available. It suggests that young people might consider practical or hands-on skills rather than long university degrees that create heavy debts.
Stay healthy and avoid ultra processed food As hospitals and medical supply chains come under pressure it will become more important to stay healthy. This means simple food, home cooking, less sugar, modest amounts of meat, and regular movement such as walking.
Grow some of your own food Even a small garden can provide fruit or vegetables. It will not make anyone fully self-sufficient. But small steps matter and provide a degree of security.
Why I Think This Matters
The article fits closely with the ideas I have been developing about the future of the United Kingdom. The decline in cheap energy, the rising cost of imported goods, and the loss of discretionary income will move the country towards a simpler and more local economy.
This will include more small farms, more local food processing, and more households growing some of their own food. It will include fewer long journeys, fewer imported goods, and a shift from highly skilled industrial jobs to more practical work with the hands. The future industrial economy will contract. The social economy will grow. Locality will become the centre of life.
The article reinforces the view that the coming shift will not be a matter of choice. It will be driven by physical limits. In that sense it supports the need to prepare for a smaller but more grounded way of living.
How fungus and Freud converge to illuminate a deep ecology of mind, nature, and human ancestry.
“Intergenerational” by Melinda Josie
By: Sharon Sliwinski
The next time you find yourself on a wooded trail, look for an old log that has been on the ground for a while. The more rot, the better. Underneath, you will likely find fuzzy, white, cobweb-like threads that are called hyphae. They are the tip of a vast fungal network called mycelium that stretches much farther than you can see, binding the soil beneath your feet, weaving into tree roots at a cellular level, channeling nutrients, and redistributing resources throughout the entire ecosystem.
In recent decades, there has been an explosion of interest in these proliferating fungal networks, including mushrooms, which are the “fruit” of these organisms. Mycelia have been described as “the grand recyclers of our planet” because they disassemble larger molecules into simpler forms, creating ever-thickening layers of soil, unlocking nutrients, and sharing them in ways that can regenerate depleted environments. Some researchers believe that mycelium is a key to our evolutionary survival.
These densely interconnected networks have also evoked comparisons to the internet and have been nicknamed the “wood wide web.” In this analogy, mycelium functions akin to fiber optic cables by providing the infrastructure for a vast subterranean communication system. Apart from allowing plants and trees to share resources — sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus — this network also allows them to communicate in the manner of a social network. While we have known for some time that trees “talk” to each other across significant distances using airborne hormones, we are just beginning to understand what occurs beneath our feet.
The mycelium/mushroom model works effectively as a way to convey the relationship between the singularity of a dream and the vast network of ideas from which it grows.
I prefer Suzanne Simard’s description of this network. Bypassing the technological metaphors, the forest scientist has shown how these fungal networks are patterned in ways that resemble the human brain (or perhaps more accurately, the human brain resembles these much more ancient networks). In the forest, trees actively perceive, communicate, and respond to one another by emitting chemical signals: “Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal networks.”
Simard has shown that there is a generational structure to this underground network. Her research shows that older trees can discern which seedlings are their own kin, and they actively nurture them using the fungal network, sending food, water, and information as needed. When these “mother trees” die, they pass on their wisdom to their kin, sharing a lifetime of acquired knowledge about how to survive in an ever-changing environment.
This relatively new body of research on mycelium — a mass noun that puts pressure on the very idea of individuality — raises questions about where species begin and end, how all living things are radically interconnected, what counts as knowledge and communication, and how information is gathered, stored, and shared.
Long before this recent scientific furor, Sigmund Freud also turned to mycelium to describe dream life. In one of the most famous passages in “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud compares mycelium to the tangled mass of unconscious thoughts out of which a dream emerges (Freud regularly took his family to the mountains outside Vienna for holidays, where they hiked, picnicked, and hunted for mushrooms):
The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation, cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.
This passage is usually understood to refer to the limitations of dream interpretation. The latent content of any given dream — what Freud calls the “dream-thoughts” — is so infinitely complex and leads in so many directions that aspects inevitably elude us. Freud calls this the “navel” of the dream. Even in the most obvious of dreams, he admits, contrary to his central thesis, there is a place that remains shrouded, a “spot where it reaches down into the unknown.”
The mycelium/mushroom model works effectively as a way to convey the relationship between the singularity of a dream and the vast network of ideas from which it grows — a network that has no definite endings and that reaches down into the unknown. The metaphor also works to highlight the generational quality of the intricate “world of thought” that dream life connects us to. The navel is, of course, a trace of a physical connection to our mothers through the umbilical cord.
When Freud’s model of dream life is brought together with contemporary descriptions of mycelium, we see something that begins to resemble the idea of a collective unconscious, a vast web of communication that does not just connect individual human beings to each other (as Carl Jung imagined) but is something akin to the way Indigenous peoples describe our radical connectedness to the greater world, an understanding that “the life of one is dependent on the life of all.”
When my friend and colleague Lewis Williams formally introduces herself, she usually says, first in the Māori language and then in English: “My ancestors are of the people of Ngāi Te Rangi, Scotland, Wales and Germany. Ngāi Tūkairangi (Tauranga Moana) and Nan Ageantaich (Isle of Arran) are my clans. I grew up in Auckland and eventually returned to the Tauranga Moana, the homelands of my Ngāi Te Rangi ancestors. I am of that land. That is the land I was birthed to.”
Williams’s area of research is human ecology — the study and practice of relationships between the natural and social environment. What she calls “radical human ecology” infuses Western definitions of the discipline with Indigenous methods that regard humanity as “an implicit part of biodiversity, embedded in a vast web of mutual and symbiotic interrelationships.” What drives her work is an effort to deepen our collective sense of relationality. Rather than focusing on whether the environment can absorb and adapt to human activity, Williams asks how we might deepen our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the living world.
This is why, in part, Williams introduces herself by describing her ancestors and the land from which she comes. Her sense of place in the world is derived from her connection to these ancestors — including Mauao, the sacred mountain of the Tauranga Moana tribe. In her case, this sense of connection was hard won. Growing up in Auckland, New Zealand, in the 1970s, she did not understand herself to be Indigenous. In fact, she once resigned from a job with the Department of Social Welfare so a Māori applicant could fill the role. At the time, Lewis was alienated from the Māori part of herself. As she put it, “I was long forgotten to my people, but worst of all, I was long forgotten to myself — to that part of myself.”
Lewis’s ancestral inheritance came to her in fragments, in vague feelings, in snatches of conversation — and in dreams. In January 2000, while she was working on her PhD dissertation, she had a significant dream that she has named “Looking Back.” It featured Jane Faulkner, one of her Māori ancestors whom she had just learned about:
I am walking onto the Marae [a sacred community space] in search of the casket of Jane Faulkner, daughter of Ruawāhine Puhi, high class woman of the Ngāi Te Rangi tribe, and Johnlees Faulkner, Pākehā [European] trader. I expect to see a Māori — looking woman in Pākehā clothing, because to me that’s who Jane was — bilingual, schooled in both Māori and European ways. For me, though, her heart was Māori.
I enter from the back. There is a group of rangatahi (youth) is standing around. I walk by and look to them expectantly; they do not see me. I can see no coffin. I walk into the wharekai (dining house) where there are some wāhine (women). Again they do not see me, do not greet me. I am invisible. I wander outside, feeling bleak. I look about. I had expected to see Jane lain out in her coffin in all her finery. I see no one, I see nothing . . . I am nothing.
I’m now on the wildest part of the Marae, the grass all long and overgrown. And then I see it. A coffin, lying in the long grass, in a state of disrepair, completely closed, one lid folded over the other, dusty, cobwebbed — long forgotten. I am long forgotten . . . to my iwi [people] and myself. I wake. I feel a deep despair.
Williams awoke from this dream deeply disturbed. But as much as it left her with a sense of despair, it also compelled her to begin descending, climbing down what she calls an “inner thread, the thread of my Ngāi Te Rangi tanga.” The dream functioned akin to the mycelium’s hyphae — a thread that led her to a larger, intricately interconnected network of kin.
For many Indigenous knowledge keepers, dreams have long been understood to be portals for accessing the metaphysical dimension and a vital means for communicating with both the natural and spiritual worlds. Williams’s dream of Jane Faulkner led her to begin reconstituting and deepening her sense of relationality through ancestral research, speaking with Ngāi Te Rangi elders, and eventually returning to Mauao, the esteemed mountain that stands guard at the entrance of Tauranga harbor.
Through this work, Lewis discovered that in 1864, during Jane Faulkner’s lifetime, her tribe’s ancestral lands — including the sacred mountain — were confiscated by the colonial government of New Zealand. In the wake of this spatial and spiritual exile, Williams’s great-grandfather moved to Auckland, and not until 2003 did Lewis and her mother reconnect with their ancestral lands and Ngai Te Rangi relatives.
It was a dream that called Lewis back, leading her to restore her connection with the land and her people — a return to the soil from which she came. Dreams, like mycelium, have the power to regenerate lifeworlds and even heal the wounds of history.
On one hand, terrible things are happening. Earth’s climate system is being destabilized, the oceans are turning acidic, wild animals are disappearing, economic inequality is soaring, politics are becoming more polarized and democracies more dysfunctional, and toxic chemicals are turning up in the bodies of people and other creatures in even the remotest and least-disturbed places on the planet. When you look at these problems closely and notice how they interact and compound one another, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we are in a time of Great Unraveling.
Action is needed to avoid the worst outcomes. Effective action requires both information and motivation. For activists, who tend to be marinated in information, fear and outrage are often fuel for efforts to change the system.
Yet, on the other hand, there is substantial evidence from psychological research showing that fear and hate can harm your relationships and health. Gratitude, instead, is the most beneficial attitude for maintaining a happy, healthy life.
But how not to feel fear, if not hate, when so much of nature and humanity is under threat? How can we feel thankful when our world is being destroyed?
These are hard realities to reconcile. What follows is intended not as a spiritual homily or a philosophical manifesto. I’m just trying to work through seemingly contradictory facts, using my preferred thought-sorting process—writing.
Gratitude Research
A robust literature of thousands of published studies shows that gratitude makes us happier and healthier. In the words of Maureen Sullivan, in an article for Harvard Medical School:
Gratitude studies are typically conducted to assess the effects of gratitude interventions and to measure levels of gratitude, comparing active study participants with control groups. Gratitude interventions include gratitude diaries, conversation programs, trainings, expression of gratitude to others, and thinking of things that make one feel thankful. Control groups, meanwhile, do similar activities that aren’t gratitude-oriented (e.g., writing food diaries rather than gratitude diaries).
Study results typically show that participants practicing gratitude score 3 to 4 percent higher in desirable outcomes.
So, gratitude sounds like a cheap tonic (though not a cure) for what ails us. Is it that simple?
Uses and Misuses of Gratitude
No, it’s complicated. Gratitude may improve our lives in many ways, but research suggests you shouldn’t rely on it during a salary negotiation with your boss. That’s the conclusion of a study led by Jeremy Yip, an assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business, who found that “in competitive contexts—such as in job negotiations, car dealerships or Facebook Marketplace sales—people who express gratitude are more likely to be taken advantage of.” Maybe that’s as much a commentary on our economic system as on gratitude itself.
Another example of a perversion of gratitude arises when people in leadership positions require underlings to express gratitude. In such cases, people with minimal social power can be kept complacent and subservient. As support for this assertion, I can reach back to my own experience earlier in life, when I was a member of a live-in spiritual community. Leaders repeatedly told recruits that “An attitude of gratitude increases your altitude,” and that complaint is spiritual poison. While those teachings held elements of truth, they also served to tamp down rank-and-file dissatisfaction with a hierarchical system of control.
How to get the benefits without the risks? There are no easy answers. Discernment and experience are required.
Gratitude “For” Versus Gratitude “In”
I’m certainly not suggesting that we should feel gratitude for climate change, extreme economic inequality, and the destruction of nature. However, given the fact that none of us individually has the power to stop the Great Unraveling, it’s fair to discuss what attitudes are most helpful under the circumstances.
Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, spent three years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. He saw some fellow prisoners survive the same conditions to which others succumbed. Frankl concluded that everything can be taken from a person, except for the freedom to choose one’s attitude, and that this inner freedom to decide how to respond to suffering can be decisive. Frankl believed that suffering is transformed by meaning, and that facing unavoidable suffering with courage and dignity can turn personal tragedy into triumph. Having a life of meaning and purpose in which I engage regularly with readers, students, and colleagues has certainly helped me feel grateful, even though my work is centered in hard truths.
So, gratitude isn’t a cure-all, especially in situations of unequal social power. But it can elevate our experiences and help us be more content and more resilient people. And we are free to choose it even in hard times.
Here’s another paradox. It may intuitively seem that people surrounded by ease and privilege would be more likely to experience gratitude than people who have few possessions and must work hard. But in fact, according to research, luck and luxury don’t seem to make people more grateful. Often, people who have very little are more likely to give thanks for life, relationships, and nature. And something that matters more than luck or privilege: culture. People who are connected with a religious tradition or an Indigenous culture tend to feel gratitude more than unaffiliated individuals.
Let Go: We’re Not Going to Fix Everything
Which brings up another problem. I’m neither religious nor a member of an Indigenous community. But I’m determined to preserve a gritty gratitude anyway. My own thankfulness is grounded in a few hard-won observations:
Life holds incredible beauty. Nature, relationships with friends and family, and the arts (just listen to James Booker playing “Sunny Side of the Street”: what did we humans do to deserve this?) all evoke feelings of thankfulness.
Still, death and decay are inevitable parts of life. Advancing age makes that fact unavoidably plain. Having a limited period of existence gives time greater value and elicits gratitude for having been granted that time.
Conflict is inherent in evolution, as is cooperation. Nature is always in flux and can be cruel as well as nurturing. The contrast makes me thankful when I observe and experience the cooperative/nurturing side of nature.
Human beings are a spectacular but deeply conflicted species. Our species’ (nearly) unique superpowers are language and tool making; with them, we can create sublime art or wreak death and destruction. I have deep gratitude for people who choose to use our superior abilities for the greater good and are able to show restraint and avoid the problems that come from wielding too much power.
Even with all this power, choices are limited. Our actions are constrained by history, genetics, parenting, brain chemistry—even what we had for breakfast this morning. As behavioral neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues in his book Determined, our actual scope of individual freedom is surprisingly small. That means both blame and praise are largely misplaced. Nevertheless, I prefer to agree with Frankl: even if our scope of choice and action is minuscule, we can still (to some extent) choose our attitude. Making the effort to understand others, especially when they are doing things that seem incomprehensibly wrong, can help us make the best of a terrible situation. We can maintain gratitude even then.
Does all this sound vaguely familiar? Perhaps that’s because it’s largely in alignment with Buddhism and Stoicism. These are what I like to think of as philosophies of limits. And it’s with a realistic sense of limits that gratitude gets grounded. It becomes a clear line of feeling tying us to the core of our being.
How to Feel More Gratitude?
Can we deliberately become more grateful? To a certain extent, yes—if we are to believe the research.
Gratitude researchers advise appreciating specific “givers” in your life by engaging in deliberate acts of thankfulness—writing a note or making phone call.
Spending more time in nature also increases your gratitude. Pay attention to non-human beings in your environment, both domesticated and non-domesticated. It’s hard not to feel grateful when you see the depth of beauty that evolution has gifted us, and when you engage with the extraordinarily varied kinds of consciousness present in creatures ranging from redwood to cricket to hummingbird, crow, salmon, raccoon, yarrow, great horned owl, coyote, and on and on. I’m particularly grateful for the non-human creatures I spend the most time with—our chickens, who teach me something new each day.
Also, as important as it is to know what is happening in the world, it’s equally necessary to disengage from news and political commentary from time to time if you want to make more space for feelings of gratitude. You are more than your opinions.
How Does This Help Now?
Deliberately feeling gratitude is not a way of insulating ourselves so that we don’t feel bad as the world around us spirals into chaos. Indeed, as Donna Jean Haraway insists, it’s important that we “stay with the trouble” in order to bear witness to this extraordinarily fraught moment.
But you can feel sorrow, fear, and pain and still feel grateful. Thankfulness builds connections with people around us and with nature. And those connections will inevitably convey pain as well as more welcome emotions.
Humanity’s only long-term solution to overshoot, the cause of the Great Unraveling, is to limit its own numbers and power. We need to partner with nature instead of trying to dominate it. Meanwhile, building societal cohesion will require reducing inequality in social power and developing our cooperative skills. Gratitude is essential to these tasks.
What if there is no long term? What if humanity is destined to run out of energy and resources and fight over the hot, polluted detritus to the point of extinction? Then maybe it’s best to go out, not with unalloyed sorrow, but with gratitude for having had the chance to experience the spark of life and be part of the grand experiment of human existence.
On the other hand, if collective survival is possible, there will be a lot of work ahead. We’ll be more effective in that work if we’re unburdened by hate and recrimination, and are instead rooted in gratitude for life, nature, and community.
Modern science has revealed a picture of the universe that differs sharply from the mechanical view we inherited from the industrial age. The world of atoms and particles, once imagined as hard little objects bouncing about in empty space, has dissolved into a web of relationships. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is defined by its interaction with everything else.
Quantum theory shows that at the smallest scale of nature, separation is an illusion. A particle has no fixed position until it interacts with another; its properties are not its own, but part of a larger pattern. The same lesson appears in the living world. A forest, for example, is not a collection of trees. It is a continuous exchange between soil, fungi, roots, air, and light. Each element draws its life from the rest.
Human societies follow the same law. Communities thrive not through competition but through relationship — through the sharing of work, knowledge, and care. In that sense, localism expresses in social form what physics and biology reveal in nature: that coherence arises from connectedness.
When economies grow beyond the reach of personal understanding, coherence is lost. The global market may seem efficient, yet it often weakens the bonds that hold life together. The shift towards localism can be seen, then, as nature restoring balance — the social equivalent of the universe seeking stability through renewed connection.
In a local economy, producers and consumers know one another. The exchange of goods and services is also an exchange of trust. Each action ripples through the small web of the locality, as energy ripples through the web of nature. The result is not perfection but balance — a kind of social harmony that mirrors the natural coherence of the physical world.
The quantum world teaches humility. It reminds us that reality is not built from separate parts but from relationships that our minds can barely grasp. Local life brings that understanding home. It allows us to live within the pattern, rather than trying to dominate it. In doing so, we rediscover the truth that health — of people, places, and the planet itself — depends on connectedness
As a podcast host, there’s one answer that I love to hear when I ask my guests a question – but I rarely ever do:
I don’t know.
To me, this answer is a signal of maturity, nuance, and honesty. It’s not trying to give an answer to all the world’s problems.
So, why is hearing “I don’t know” so rare?
We are all members of a social species embedded in a modern culture that’s been turbocharged by energy surplus and social technology. But in this modern setting we still seek status and respect as a product of our evolutionary wiring. Because of this, in most public settings, especially in the media, we overvalue confidence, bravado, and certainty. Today, saying “I don’t know” is seen as a sign of weakness, not of wisdom.
But in a world increasingly defined by ideological debates, when you hear these words today, they act as a sort of antidote to our cultural consensus trance. Admitting uncertainty makes room for discourse and the possibility of different answers.
In fact, I’m beginning to think that the reluctance to express “I don’t know” (or its equivalent) out loud is a fatal flaw in our culture as we begin to discuss our vastly complex, risky, and rapidly approaching future – which is chock full of uncertainties.
The Right Answer on Wall Street
So back in the day, over 30 years ago, I started working at Salomon Brothers, which at the time was one of the coolest places on Wall Street. Their highly respected training program kicked our asses, and one of the key things I remember is that they would ask a series of questions, starting with something simple that you learn in business school like, “What’s the duration of a 30 year note?” Next, they would ask a slightly harder question: “What’s the ticker symbol of Yahoo?” Easy!: YHOO.
Nate in training at Salomon Brothers
And then, after you answered the first two questions, they would ask you a really hard question that you weren’t supposed to be able to answer. Since we want to impress our bosses, we would inevitably make something up or guess, and then they would come down on us hard.
What we were supposed to say, as eventual salespeople who would be talking to billionaires and institutional managers, is “I don’t know, but I will find out and get back to you.” Because making up answers may sound good on the surface, but doing so would only cause more problems and make us appear incompetent when they turn out to be wrong later.
That concept was drilled into me in my early 20s. But, in the intervening 30 years, I’ve noticed that “I don’t know” is rarely spoken, at least publicly. Our culture doesn’t merely tolerate and accept overconfidence, but actually prioritizes it – and we end up paying a premium for it.
We see this as social media feeds boost a really bold claim, which then goes viral, while the more accurate and nuanced one gets minimal views. On TV and in the news, producers book guests with crisp and sharp takes, not the careful, qualifying one. Even in choosing guests for this show, I lean towards the articulate, confident, charismatic spokesperson for topics over the best scientist. In classrooms the quick hand beats the methodological thinker – and I know this because even in third grade I had the fast hand! In boardrooms and C-Suites, it’s the fast, confident answer that outshines the humble hypothesis. Our modern status economy runs on conviction and linearity, while nuance and caution only slow us down.
Why does this happen? Well, there are three – at least three – intertwining reasons why confidence and lack of humility rise to the top in our current culture.
Three Levels of the Confidence Game
Uncertainty is Stressful
First, at the physiological level within an individual, uncertainty itself actually feels bad. Most of us don’t really think about it, but uncertainty is reflected as a bodily state within us. Human brains are extremely good at predictions: we’re always guessing what’s going to come next and then checking that guess against the reality in front of us. When the world becomes more chaotic, these prediction errors spike and kick in our sympathetic nervous system, what we might call our “bodily alarm network”.
So when our stressed system releases cortisol and we start to feel things like a tight chest, a fluttery stomach, or an increased heart rate, these inform our gut that something is ‘off,’ even before we can really explain why.
And furthermore, being uncertain – by definition – occurs when we build multiple mental possibilities and hold them all at once. In a literal sense, the added complexity of doing this requires more energy for our brains in the form of glucose. Holding uncertainty is costly!
When we’re running parallel mental scenarios, inhibiting quick answers and requiring more context flip-flopping, our bodies don’t like the inefficient use of energy. As this stress increases, our bodies push us to pick some story – any story – to shut the alarms off.
Back in the day on the plains of Tanzania, this response was evolutionarily helpful. For instance, it was safer to assume the rustle in the bushes was a lion rather than the wind, because it was better to have a false alarm over a fatal pause (or maybe fatal “claws”). This translates into today, where modern society continues to reinforce this by rewarding decisive signals over caveats, resulting in “I don’t know” feeling like a professional status risk.
Put that all together, and at the level of the individual human physiology, uncertainty feels both uncomfortable and potentially costly. So it’s no wonder that fantasy and doom often become our default perspectives, rather than sitting with the unknown and being open to learning.
Motivated Reasoning
Building on the individual bodily reaction, once beliefs are formed at a higher level, they develop antibodies that make us resistant to change. This is called an ideological immune system, and we all have one. Once a worldview works for us we defend it.
Importantly, a lot of modern research shows that the ‘smartest’ among us are often better at arguing their own side, but also more likely to double-down on their beliefs on highly charged and divisive topics. This tells us that smart people aren’t necessarily right more of the time, but they are better at rationalizing their own positions. This is called motivated reasoning, and it’s very effective at preserving our personal blind spots.
Authority Bias
Moving another layer above, we have culture-wide human cognitive phenomena like authority bias (among many other biases).
Authority bias is our built-in tendency to trust and comply with people who display signals of high cultural status – titles, uniform, and expert credentials – despite contradictory evidence showing they shouldn’t be trusted. This human tendency has been demonstrated over and over again. Famously, in the Milgram experiment, ordinary people kept delivering what they thought were painful and nearly fatal electric shocks, just because the person telling them to do it was in a lab coat. Another classic field study set in a hospital showed that 95% of nurses prepared an excessive, unauthorized medical dose based solely on a stranger’s phone order because they were claiming to be a doctor – even though the rules forbade it.
Many other studies have repeatedly shown that humans are more likely to obey requests from persons with perceived authority. These examples are all from different settings, but they show the same pattern: signals of authority lower our skepticism, and they raise our compliance. This might not seem surprising, but it does help explain why a lot of us tend to go on autopilot at times when we probably most need to be thinking critically.
This pattern also partially explains why ‘misinformation’ works so well – it’s easy for companies to throw money behind a confident spokesperson to promote an unscientific campaign that’s good for business.
We Want Our Leaders to Have the Answers
From a cultural perspective, we can see why people in authority rarely say, “I don’t know,” because if they did, they’d be replaced by another person who could give an answer and seem to better know what they’re doing. Basically, confident guesses rise to the top, and culture-wide – almost as if by compulsion from what I refer to as the global economic super organism dynamic – we have learned to speak past uncertainty, round off any error bars, and, ultimately, act first confidently and check later.
These incentives shape the outcomes we see around us. Projects start with rosy baselines and then invariably end up with cost overruns. Politicians will campaign on certain guarantees and then walk those promises back when they’re elected and actually have to govern. Even in science, publication biasreduces the chance that statistically insignificant results get published, skewing the body of evidence. So overconfidence in our culture is rewarded at the front end and only punished, if at all, in hindsight – which means the person who benefits is rarely the person (or culture) who pays. The public pays in trust, money, and time. To those who follow TGS, it’s also obvious that our planet pays (and ergo we also pay) in the form of ecological stability.
Enter: Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence adds a relevant wrinkle here, because it also rewards confident responses, turbocharging what is already a human tendency – which naturally makes sense because humans created AI.
Most people who use AI have heard of the concept of hallucinations. This is when a large language model confidently generates an answer that isn’t true.
The main software of ChatGPT-5 hallucinates around 10% of the time when it has internet access. But without internet access, this increases to almost half of all answers. So why do chat bots make stuff up? It’s because their training incentivizes answering every inquiry, whether they’re right or not. It’s an issue in fundamental logic. When training a large language model to perform well in competitions, what’s important is what wins, not what’s true. If you think of a quiz show where the only way to get points is to give the correct answer. You don’t lose anything by not guessing, but you also don’t lose anything from getting the answer wrong. Since there are no downsides to guessing, it is always in your favor to attempt answering – and bonus points if you convince the host you’re right anyway.
This is the game that AI is designed to play within. Over a million iterations, such a system would learn to speak smoothly and confidently, even when it’s unsure.
In a recent paper in collaboration with Georgia Tech, OpenAI (who makes ChatGPT) stopped framing hallucinations as a surprising fluke, but rather as an inevitable outcome of “natural statistical pressures” – what might be called “statistical destiny.” So when you combine humans and AI, you get even more overconfidence and deceptively persuasive answers.
Reinforcing these findings further, there was a new Stanford paper that coined the term ‘Moloch’s Bargain’ for what happens when large language models start competing for attention, sales, or votes, and the results were striking (though perhaps if you’ve followed this story, not surprising). It showed that for every gain in the model performance came an even bigger loss in honesty. In effect, more deceptive marketing, more disinformation in political campaigns, and more fake and harmful social media posts.
As an aside – not one I enjoy thinking or talking about – I worry a lot about the merger of AI with military capacity. I’ve been informed by people who are in a position to know that we’ve actually avoided a dozen, or perhaps even more, potential nuclear wars in the last 50 years. Most of these near-misses were avoided because at the time a single human was unsure and they chose to hold off until they had more information. If LLMs are trained on worst-case possibilities and gain control of these defense systems, the rational speed bumps of uncertainty and waiting that come from the gut-feeling of a human might disappear. This is one of the few things that keeps me up at night.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that this is not just an AI problem, but really a mirror into our cultural values and behaviors – because we train ourselves the same way. As I mentioned before, social media emphasizes confident clips, companies promote decisive talkers, and politicians prioritize simplicity and easy to understand things over truth and complexity. In the context of the human predicament, economists tell stories of infinite growth, and that technology will be able to solve any challenges along our way.
Ultimately, the result is human hallucination. The cultural stories we tell ourselves, which then guide our actions, wildly outpace our energy, ecosystem, and time constraints. And then we’re shocked – shocked – when reality shows up to stare us in the face and remind us that infinite growth is not possible in a finite system.
The Deeper Costs
How do the costs of overconfidence actually manifest in society? People following this platform are well aware of the modern costs of overconfidence and certainty on the ecological side – and still we seem to discover more and more impacts every year. But beyond the environment, we can think of examples like the Challenger Space Shuttle launch: managers waved off the engineers’ concerns about the O-rings and low temps, and it resulted in seven lives lost.
(By the way, I watched this live at Kronshage Hall at University of Wisconsin when I was at college. It’s strange how the amygdala hangs onto these little emotional memories during the lifespan of a human brain.
Another well known example is the housing bubble that led to the 2008 Great Recession. Ratings and models said this is safe leverage, and optimism said ‘let’s party,’ while the few voices who dissented and called for caution were ignored. Cue: global crisis.
And again with the oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, which took shortcuts that looked efficient until they weren’t, leading to one of the largest oil spills in history and eleven lost lives. Governments also do this all the time, overpromising on the timeline and budgets of big projects, which eventually morph into years of delays and overruns. Challenges are normal, but it’s the overly optimistic baseline at the beginning which is the mistake. This is a repeating pattern in our culture. Certainty beats caution, and the costs come later.
… And the costs come later.
(“And the costs come later” might actually be a good mnemonic tagline for homo sapiens. Unfortunately, ‘later’ is arriving sooner than many of us think.)
Overconfidence in the Human System
One could argue that overconfidence and lack of caution is one of the core underlying drivers of the maximum power principle, which itself is underpinning global human ecological overshoot and the impending great simplification. (In fact, I may dedicate a future piece entirely to this concept). In some ways, this story seems to dovetail with Dark Triad personality traits – especially psychopathy – which is also worth pondering more.
But our predisposition towards certainty can be overruled by a trump card, which is self-introspection, learning, and the fast pace of cultural change.
To start, in my opinion, the mere act of saying “I don’t know” shifts the dynamic back to curiosity and the possibility for change. It re-engages our prefrontal cortex and it makes cooperation with others easier because we’re no longer defending an identity whose scaffolding was certainty. If you can’t admit that you don’t know, then you can’t really hear anything else.
Admitting uncertainty lets us engage in experiments, instead of arguments, and it creates room to develop scenarios. More importantly, uncertainty extends conversations with people who we might otherwise not talk to because we think we disagree from the start.
Can We Embrace Uncertainty?
So how do we put this into practice? I’m tempted to say, “I don’t know” and end this essay here, but – out of the desire to not just highlight a problem and then say goodbye – the following are some directional ideas.
Some guidance might come from the world of AI itself. In their aforementioned Why Language Models Hallucinate paper, OpenAI proposed a fix to hallucinations, not in the form of more data or a larger computer, but merely through changing the “benchmarks of success” when training models. This would be done by penalizing confident inaccurate answers more than when an AI admits uncertainty, and even giving partial credit for “I don’t know”. This idea originally comes from changes in the way standardized tests are graded in order to disincentivize blind guessing. If this works, and confidence thresholds are added to calibrate behavior, the hope is that models will stop bluffing – aka ‘hallucinating’ – when they’re uncertain.
This idea is really encouraging, but the caveat is whether the customers of OpenAI themselves will miss the model that gives persuasive, confident answers, and move to another model that delivers the desired ‘certainty porn.’ Regardless, it’s a shift in the right direction. I wonder what would happen if our society did the same?
What about us as individuals? It might be helpful to start by looking within. Try to notice when you’re giving an answer that you don’t fully understand or know to be a little untrue, and call it out to yourself and fact check it.
(I like to imagine a little Nate on my shoulder to voice these things to – perhaps you have a little Kathleen or little Joe or little Fang Li or whoever is reading this).
By doing this more with ourselves, it might help us get in tune with our gut feeling. By listening to the little part of you that says “Something is off with this story,” it may become more and more accurate and sensitive to when others are trying to sell you something that’s only half baked.
Something I’ve discussed in a previous Frankly is thinking in probabilities. The added twist here is to consciously calibrate the probabilities of your claims and then score how accurate you are. It might be as simple as, “I think there’s a 10% chance it snows this week, 30% next week, and 60% by next month,” and then see how you do when reality arrives. Of course, this practice risks triggering a collective action problem if you’re the only one in your network doing it. But, if a lot of people do this, I think it would be helpful.
And then there’s the somewhat well-known concept of Red Teams, which make dissent and uncertainty a formal role in any scenario, as opposed to a risk.
This can look like a designated person who plays ‘devil’s advocate’ to flesh out any weak points in a plan or statement. It might be helpful to then rotate whoever is tasked with being the skeptic, and to even thank these people publicly for playing that role on your team. This could be at work, or even at your community board meeting or your family check-ins. Rewarding uncertainty feels counterintuitive, but if it works for machines, maybe it could work for us.
Conclusion
In today’s society, we’re assailed from all angles with social and environmental problems, information overload from 24/7 internet access, and endless dopamine hits from gambling, pornography, shopping, and ever-increasing AI content – our minds are constantly full.
All of this excess is moving us further and further away from the cultural ability to express “I don’t know,” because we want the ease of a straightforward, decisive answer.
If someone is on the news, testifying to Congress, or is being publicly asked for the answers to our financial or ecological problems, replying, “I don’t know, but I can find out and get back to you,” would result in quickly being replaced by someone with a pithy, witty, or confident answer. And with all three, they’ll be branded an expert and invited back. The uncertain, careful answer – in today’s world – implies weakness rather than wisdom.
So what is the answer? I don’t know. But I suspect if we’re able to change how we keep score for ourselves, at home, at work, in the media, and especially in discussions about the future so that truthfulness and humility are as important as knowing the answers, I expect our systems would naturally get smarter and kinder.
What if those three magic words aren’t the end of the sentence, but the start of learning?
Tim Watkins’ latest piece ends with a truth that most of us have long suspected but never dared to say aloud – nobody is in control. There is no plan, no strategy, no calm hand on the tiller. The people who are meant to be running the show are mostly busy explaining why nothing is their fault, while the rest of us are left to tidy up after them.
At first, that sounds terrifying. The idea that no one’s in charge of the nation’s great machinery, or even understands how the levers work anymore, is enough to make anyone nostalgic for the days when “strong leadership” meant something. But perhaps we should relax. Maybe this is exactly how localism begins.
Because the truth is, real control has always been an illusion. Even in its heyday, the industrial economy was a sprawling collection of improvised fixes that just happened to work for a while. Now that the fixes are breaking down, the system looks lost – but the people aren’t.
When government no longer knows what to do, we quietly start doing things ourselves. We mend the shed roof rather than waiting for an insurance company that never answers the phone. We share food, tools, and gossip. We rediscover what it means to be useful, rather than merely employed.
And while the official world debates growth targets and future technologies, the informal world – our world – gets on with the practical business of living. That’s localism. It doesn’t need permission or policy. It just grows naturally in the cracks of a crumbling system.
So when Tim says nobody’s in control, we might take that not as a warning but as a sign of progress. The old order is stepping back, albeit clumsily, to make room for something smaller, humbler, and far more human.
The lights may flicker in Whitehall, but in the streets and kitchens of ordinary people, a new kind of intelligence is quietly switching on.
A Practical Guide – 3rd Edition THE HONEST SORCERER
This is a provocative view of the future by the Honest Sorcerer. There is a list of links at the end of the piece which, together, provide an insight into current thinking about the future by individuals who don’t have a vested interest in maintaining the growth mindset.
Because of its length it is attached as a PDF file.
Barlow Books announces the publication of The Great Canadian Reset: Why Co-ops Are the Right Choice for Canada’s Future by Ludovic Viger
In this wide-ranging book, Viger explores how we can thrive when the economy slows down and even shrinks.
He says we are facing a period of de-growth because the time of Cheap Oil, which has fuelled our economic growth since the Industrial Revolution, is over.
So what are we supposed to do now?
Viger says is possible to thrive in this challenging world, and there’s a proven model that shows how: co-ops. They’ve been successful in many spheres of life, from agriculture to housing to finance, and they’ve succeeded even in bad times. This is a book that provides a workable solution to the problems of our time, solutions that can be embraced by thinkers and policy-makers across the political spectrum.
The Aviva “Building Future Communities 2025” report is a well-structured analysis of how the UK must prepare for the escalating impacts of climate change—especially flooding, subsidence, and heat—by mid-century. Although written from a corporate and national policy perspective, it contains significant implications for localism that go well beyond its surface message.
Aviva is a major UK-based insurance and financial services company. It’s one of the largest insurers in Britain.
Aviva warns that by 2050:
Flood-risk homes in England could rise by 25–27%, reaching about 8 million properties.
1.4 million more properties could face subsidence risk.
Extreme heat will endanger health, infrastructure, and habitability.
The report proposes six “calls for change”:
Tougher planning rules to stop building in flood zones.
Compulsory low-cost flood-resilience measures in all new homes.
Mandatory Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS).
Government-backed Natural Flood Management (NFM) and private-sector investment.
A Resilient Buildings Taskforce to unite housing, finance, and planning policy.
More innovation and regulation to protect homes from heat.
Case studies (York, Cardiff Bay, Edinburgh Castle, etc.) show practical responses already underway.
Implications for localism
Although the report’s framing is largely top-down, its findings implicitly confirm the necessity of a bottom-up, community-led transition—the essence of localism.
1. The failure of centralised systems
The report highlights how national flood defences, urban drainage, and central planning cannot cope with climate-driven pressures.
Surface water flooding, now the biggest rising risk, is inherently local and unpredictable.
Many defences are owned privately or by local authorities, not by the Environment Agency.
Maintenance and funding backlogs show that central government control is overstretched.
→ Localism implication: resilience must increasingly be managed at the community level—through neighbourhood flood groups, local adaptation plans, and locally funded or self-organised works.
2. Community resilience and neighbour networks
Aviva praises the Pontcanna (Cardiff) initiative, where residents created a local flood plan, registered vulnerable people, and rehearsed emergency procedures. This is an explicit demonstration of social capital in action—the very network of informal relationships on which localism depends.
→ Localism implication: the most successful adaptation is social, not technical. It arises from relationships of trust, cooperation, and shared responsibility—core principles of an informal economy.
3. Nature-based solutions as local land stewardship
Natural Flood Management (tree planting, leaky dams, wetland restoration) relies on small-scale, distributed action across catchments. Such systems cannot be delivered solely by national agencies; they require local landholders, farmers, and communities to collaborate.
→ Localism implication: environmental resilience becomes a shared landscape duty, giving rural communities a new civic and economic role as custodians of their ecosystems.
4. Adaptation of the built environment
The report calls for widespread retrofit of flood and heat-resilience features. This aligns with the idea of re-localised construction trades—craftsmen, small builders, and voluntary repair groups—replacing large corporate developers. Local adaptation will depend on distributed skills and small-scale enterprise, not remote regulation.
5. From formal control to informal initiative
Although Aviva recommends new national regulations, the underlying data point to a future where:
Insurance cover becomes increasingly conditional or unaffordable.
National defence budgets cannot protect all communities.
Individuals and local groups must act pre-emptively.
→ Localism implication: a gradual withdrawal of the formal system (insurance, national infrastructure, planning control) will push resilience functions into informal systems of mutual aid, self-protection, and local investment—hallmarks of a shrinking, post-growth economy.
6. Restoring natural and social capital
Aviva’s support for nature-based flood management and local resilience groups unintentionally endorses local economic self-reliance—where communities invest time and effort in collective maintenance rather than financial growth. This is consistent with your argument that as discretionary markets decline, social and ecological repair will become the new economy.
Critical reflection
While the report’s tone remains corporate and technocratic, it reveals an unavoidable truth: the formal, centralised model of climate governance cannot secure the nation’s resilience. Communities must become self-organising, ecologically literate, and mutually supportive. In short, climate adaptation is the practical route by which localism will emerge from necessity.
concluding observation
The “Building Future Communities 2025” report, though framed as a call for national coordination, actually illustrates the limits of that coordination. In practice, resilience will depend on thousands of local initiatives—socially embedded, place-based, and self-managed. Climate change is not only a threat but a catalyst for the transformation from a formal industrial society to an informal, localist one.
This piece builds on the themes of “Beyond Growth: The Unavoidable Reality of Nature’s Limits”.
It explores how localism offers a natural path forward as the industrial economy reaches its limits of complexity, cost, and energy use. The argument here is simple: when money, time, and energy are seen together, the localist system emerges not as a retreat from modernity, but as its practical successor — leaner, slower, and more human.
We’ve grown used to measuring everything in money. Governments talk about GDP, companies talk about profit, and even charities measure their “impact” in pounds. But few of us stop to ask a simpler question: how are we actually spending our time, and how much energy does it take to keep our modern way of life going?
If we look at those two things — time and energy — the story of the industrial economy begins to look rather odd.
The time drain in your pocket Take your smartphone. It’s a wonderful tool, but also a thief of hours. The average adult in Britain now spends about four hours a day staring at one. Some of that time is useful — arranging a delivery, checking the weather, or messaging a friend. But most of it isn’t.
Scrolling through news feeds, watching short videos, chasing adverts, re-entering passwords: this is busy work, not productive work. It feels active, but it rarely produces anything of value.
If you add it up, that’s more than 1,000 hours a year — almost half a working year — spent in digital drift. Imagine what that same time could do in the real world: repairing a fence, helping a neighbour, or tending a garden.
The rise of the one-time password It’s getting worse, not better. Have you noticed how many times a day you now have to “prove” who you are?
One-time passwords, security codes, captchas, and two-step verification now clutter almost every online interaction.
Each one takes only a few seconds, but across millions of people and thousands of logins a day, it adds up to an invisible national time tax. It’s the cost of living in a complex, centralised system that no one fully trusts.
These checks don’t grow food, fix shoes, or care for the elderly. They simply maintain the machinery of complexity. The industrial economy, which once promised efficiency, now devotes an increasing share of our collective time to protecting itself from itself.
The hidden electricity bill Phones themselves don’t use much power — perhaps a few kilowatt-hours a year, costing less than a cup of coffee. The trouble lies in the system that supports them.
Every text, photo, and video passes through mobile masts, fibre networks, and giant data centres that run 24 hours a day. For every unit of electricity used to charge your phone, thirty to fifty units are burned somewhere else to keep the network alive.
When you multiply that by 50 million UK users, the total is about five terawatt-hours a year — roughly 1½ per cent of all the electricity Britain uses. That’s equivalent to a small power station running flat out just to support our smartphone habits.
And most of that energy isn’t producing anything tangible. It’s pushing adverts, holding temporary data, and waiting for the next scroll.
The industrial model: high output, low efficiency The modern industrial economy runs on this kind of hidden overhead. Every product or service depends on huge networks of energy, information, and security. The system looks efficient when you measure it in pounds per hour, but not when you measure it in human hours or kilowatt-hours.
For every hour of true production, several more are spent on administration, verification, and digital upkeep.
The localist alternative Now imagine a more grounded way of working — the localist economy.
Here, people make, grow, repair, and care directly. They use simple digital tools when needed but don’t live through them. Work is personal, trust is local, and value is measured by usefulness, not by the number of clicks.
A local baker sells to nearby families. A handyman repairs what’s already there. A neighbour shares surplus fruit rather than advertising it online. Electricity might come from rooftop panels, a village turbine, or a community battery. Transactions are trusted, so no one wastes time proving their identity three times a day.
Time is used directly, and energy travels short distances.
Why localism becomes competitive At first glance, this might seem nostalgic or even inefficient — until you remember that national electricity and digital overheads are now very expensive.
Industrial firms are locked into the national grid, long supply chains, and heavy data use. Their costs rise with every energy price increase and every new security regulation.
Local producers, by contrast, can use their own power and keep things simple. They don’t need to heat giant buildings or refrigerate goods for long journeys. They don’t run constant advertising campaigns or manage digital payment systems. They just work and trade.
So as national energy prices climb, local producers quietly become more competitive.
Time efficiency versus financial efficiency
It’s worth separating two kinds of efficiency.
The industrial world is efficient with money but wasteful of time. The localist world is modest with money but careful with time.
In human terms, the second is often more productive. A person who spends their day doing useful, tangible things — even unpaid — contributes more to life than someone trapped in administrative loops or digital distraction.
The phone, used properly This doesn’t mean we should throw our phones away. They’re marvellous for the right tasks: sharing knowledge, finding tools, checking weather patterns, or contacting customers. The problem is overuse. The aim is to put the phone back in its proper place — as a servant, not a master.
If average daily use fell from four hours to half an hour, the nation would save tens of billions of human hours each year and several terawatt-hours of electricity. That’s a lot of freed capacity — both mental and electrical — for things that actually matter.
The wider picture When energy and digital costs rise faster than wages fall, simplicity wins. Localism’s strength lies in this simplicity: short distances, direct trust, human time, and small power sources close to where people live.
The industrial economy will still exist for some large-scale or specialist tasks, but its cost base will keep rising as it feeds its own complexity. The localist economy, lighter and slower, will quietly outcompete it in many everyday activities — not through subsidies or slogans, but through basic physics and human sense.
A quiet revolution The recovery of productive time and local energy isn’t a step backwards. It’s a return to proportion.
As people spend less time proving who they are and more time being who they are, life will feel less hurried and more useful.
That may turn out to be the real measure of prosperity in the years ahead — not how much money changes hands, but how wisely we spend our limited time and energy.
When we see people of all ages and both sexes demonstrating under St George’s Cross and the Union flag, and when local residents hang flags on lampposts, it is a sign of something momentous.
This combination of English and British flags is full of meaning, symbolising respectively the culture of the country and the sovereignty of the state – both now under threat.
Usually, displaying the flag signals loyalty. Today, it has become a sign of discontent. When local authorities remove our national flags because they are deemed “dangerous”, the point is emphatically underlined. “We are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet”, warned the writer GK Chesterton in 1908.
Some of our rulers would prefer that it remain that way.
The English exception
Flags have not usually inspired in England the emotion they hold in some other countries. We use them on shopping bags, underwear and cushion covers. We shrug if angry foreigners burn them. This is partly because we have many other national symbols, most obviously the monarchy.
People in Union flag waistcoats at the VE Day 80 procession in London on May 5 2025 Credit: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg
Moreover, when England was at the heart of an empire and of a successful multinational state, flag-waving seemed unnecessary and even provocative. It was what foreigners did. The English, and the British more generally, confined themselves to a limited number of official days on which the Union flag would be decorously flown. We were confident enough in who and what we were not to need to wrap ourselves in it. Today, however, flying flags that assert English and British national identity challenges the legitimacy of the country’s own elites.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened.
The idea of national sovereignty was, from its beginnings in the 17th century, a weapon against the traditional powers of monarchs, nobles and priests. The English version was the idea of the “Norman yoke”, which had dispossessed the indigenous people and replaced Saxon liberty with oppression. Even today, one study suggests, people with traditional English surnames are less well off than those with French-sounding names.
Yet this never had the explosive force of other countries’ nationalist myths. The English elite – including the descendants of the Normans – generally sought the consent of their subjects, and were sensible enough to widen the political nation to include potential opponents. Even before it became democratic, England was highly participatory, and bad kings, however sacred, were disposed of by the “community of the realm”. Above all, England has been rich for centuries and has avoided devastating defeat and invasion, the most destructive of revolutionary forces.
The forging of England
Many readers of these lines, I suspect, and many of those hanging flags on lampposts or painting red crosses on roundabouts, would consider that this broadly successful history of England has ended.
I sometimes fear so too, recalling Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt in Richard II: “That England that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”
Many feel that the England they knew and loved is going, or is gone.
England has, over the many centuries of its existence, been in continual flux. Despair about its future has been recurrent. It would be easy enough, if we chose, to recount its history as a succession of catastrophes. The Norman conquest was surely the greatest: the total seizure of all land, the systematic destruction of cultural heritage, the imposition of serfdom, even the eclipse of the language. Yet the new masters called themselves English, much as the Dutch in South Africa called themselves Afrikaans; a new hybrid England emerged.
The Norman conquest created a hybrid England, blending French and Anglo-Saxon traditions into a new nation. (Pictured: James Norton as King Harold in the BBC’s King & Conqueror) Credit: BBC/CBS Studios/Lilja Jons
This England, not its Anglo-Saxon prototype, is the one we have inherited. It became a prosperous exporter of raw materials to more sophisticated markets – a sort of medieval Australia. Foreigners thought its people violent and drunken. The Black Death wiped out half of them but eventually left the survivors better off. A new English culture emerged, influenced by France and Italy, pioneered by Chaucer and reaching its peak in Shakespeare.
But the disastrous loss of ancestral territories on the Continent plunged England into the Wars of the Roses. Then came the cataclysm of the Reformation, followed by two centuries of merciless religious conflict. Foreigners saw 17th-century England as a vicious nest of king-killing fanatics, its politics uncontrollably unstable.
To general astonishment, the 18th century then discovered modernity: liberty, science, politeness, commerce, empire, even happiness. England ceased to be Europe’s laughing stock and became a great power, a partner in union with Scotland. The loss of the American colonies again plunged patriots into despair. Then came utter transformation – what a French economist dubbed the “Industrial Revolution”.
William Shakespeare shaped the nation’s language and culture from the 16th century Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Within a lifetime, England became a different place. Contemporaries realised they were living through unprecedented and unpredictable changes: frightening demographic growth threatened famine, new towns mushroomed, old ways of life were swept away, London and the great commercial cities expanded, and technological transformation happened so fast it made the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray feel like “Father Noah and his family out of the Ark”.
A once self-supporting country became dependent on imported food and raw materials, and hence had to export or die.
Friedrich Engels, the Manchester businessman and communist theorist, predicted confidently that “the revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution”.
On the contrary, by an extraordinary collective effort, the Victorians managed to tame incipient revolution and create a peaceful, prosperous and law-abiding society, with crime falling to its lowest ever level. But the England that the Victorians made was devastated by two world wars, economic depression, and a deindustrialisation that still pauperises whole populations. Then came the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which arguably made the Sixties generation more different from its parents than any generation in history.
Revolution today
Forgive this gallop through history. But it is important. Today we are undergoing demographic shocks comparable in scale with the early 19th century, combined with cultural, ethnic and political changes as great as those of the 1960s – but without economic growth to cushion the impact.
As a result, the questions I am asking – indeed, am asking myself – are these: what is England and Englishness? When did what we think of as Englishness emerge? Is what is happening to us today different from earlier periods of moral and social disruption?
Allen Newick, the landlord of the George and Crown in Somerset, waves a Union flag at a rehearsal for Elizabeth II’s coronation, May 1953 Credit: Haywood Magee/Picture Post/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images
England is one of the oldest continuous nations, arguably the prototype of the nation-state, defined by common institutions and broad participation in government – for example, by jury service, local office-holding and legal rights. Given its size and social mobility, its identity was a diverse one: Cornishmen were not the same as Londoners or Yorkshiremen, and yet they all recognised themselves as English.
Englishness meant loyalty to a common monarch and a common Church, with Parliament and the common law as important national symbols. England ceased to be a nation-state in 1707, but it retained a sense of cultural identity and remained predominant within the Union.
These general observations might suggest a long period of fundamental continuity. Nevertheless, in other ways, English society, beliefs and manners changed profoundly and repeatedly. A 15th-century Englishman or woman would have struggled to accept post-Reformation society – some chose exile, ruin or death. Oliver Cromwell and Charles I would have been astounded and horrified by George III’s England, with its drinking, sexual libertinism and intellectual freedom. Samuel Johnson would have found the noisy, teeming, smoke-filled England of Dickens a nightmare. William Gladstone could not have comprehended Tony Blair’s Britain, with its religious indifference, lack of deference, permissive morality and intellectual frivolity.
The different Englands each had known, with their characteristic beliefs, manners, standards of civility and political structures, had all evaporated.
England fans flying the Union flag at the 1966 World Cup Final at Wembley Credit: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive
Ours will evaporate too, and we, like our forebears, will lament it. People of my generation were born in an England still living amid the vestiges of Victorianism. The anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer described the English in the 1950s as “gentle, courteous and orderly […] you hardly ever see a fight in a bar […] football crowds are as orderly as church meetings”.
Much that seemed “typically English” – reticent, law-abiding, respectable, patriotic, strict, snobbish, yet free – was little more than a century old.
It melted away in the 1960s. Yet those years too were undeniably “typically English”: the Beatles and Kingsley Amis were as English as Edward Elgar and WS Gilbert. Over the centuries, England had been seen successively as violent, revolutionary, traditional, brutal, gentle, aggressive, peaceful, aristocratic and democratic. Even cruelty to animals was once considered an English characteristic, and attempts to stop bull-baiting sparked riots.
What and who are we now? Given all these changes, I was not surprised that some readers insist that Englishness is essentially a matter of ancestry. After all, if Englishness is always changing, only genes remain constant. But this is Englishness reduced to its barest biological minimum, and it is not a very English idea: Englishness has rarely been seen as dependent on purity of blood. Daniel Defoe dismissed the notion in 1701 in his popular satire, The True-Born Englishman, describing England as Europe’s “jakes”, where she “voids all her offal cast-out progeny”.
The Beatles (pictured in 1963) epitomised 1960s England, a period of cultural change that was still unmistakably ‘typically English’ Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Nor, indeed, has Englishness been based on cultural insularity or the worship of origins. Our ancestors embraced the globe – perhaps too eagerly. They were entranced by Greek statuary, Paris fashions, Indian philosophy and Japanese art. Even those who rediscovered English landscape and folk traditions rarely turned their backs on the wider world.
I am certainly not arguing for multiculturalism or open borders. Nor am I suggesting that there is nothing to worry about because change and flux are inevitable and every generation laments the world it has lost. The great historic changes I have referred to above were survivable – England evidently endured, however transformed – but they were nevertheless cataclysmic and, for many living through them, disastrous. Even if, in safe retrospect, we conclude that the benefits eventually outweighed the costs, those costs were nonetheless grievous.
Mass immigration today may not have the transformative effects of the Norman conquest, the Reformation or the Industrial Revolution, but it does place major strains on our society. It undermines our solidarity and coherence, imposes dangerous burdens on our economy, and weakens unity in the face of external threats. The long-term effects are unknown.
Always old and always new, England is – to paraphrase Roger Scruton, the philosopher – founded on a sense of place and a sense of belonging. I have argued before that we have a pressing interest and duty to incorporate those who have permanently settled here or who are born here of foreign parents. Many believe this is impossible. If they are right, we are in serious trouble. But I do not believe they are right, and in any case, counsels of despair are guaranteed to realise the worst predictions. We must act with what we have. But to succeed, we must end uncontrolled immigration and require integration as other countries – for example, Denmark – have begun to do.
Migrants in a dinghy making their way across the Channel from France in September 2020 Credit: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images
We shall not succeed in integrating everyone – yes, there are doubtless Islamist fanatics arriving on rubber boats – but we need to integrate most people and their children. Here there is a barrier: it is not so much the refusal of some immigrants to integrate as the refusal of many in power in Britain to do what is necessary to integrate them, or even to limit the numbers arriving.
Central to today’s crisis is the way we are governed, and the people who govern us. Scholars have analysed the disintegrative forces at work in modern society, from global capitalism to the internet. But in Britain, as in some other Western countries, we are seeing something unprecedented: the rejection of the nation by a significant part of its own elites.
In previous centuries, whether we were governed by kings, nobles or parliaments, all were committed to the good of the nation as they understood it. Their own futures depended on national success, and their achievements were often outstanding.
And now? Future historians may conclude that the heyday of the nation-state lasted only from the late 18th century to the late 20th. Part of the downfall of the ideal of the sovereign, culturally distinct, democratic nation was a revulsion against war, blamed on nationalism. Hence the 1920s to Thirties vogue for internationalism, pacifism and communism – a time when English intellectuals, as George Orwell remarked, took their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. The Second World War and the Cold War regenerated national identity in the face of common danger.
But since the 1990s, a Western mixture of anarchic individualism, globalisation, American anti-racism and fashionable anti-colonialism has proved all too effective in subverting common nationhood. As is now clear, this incoherent ideological cocktail appeals particularly to a new elite, under 50, proudly cosmopolitan in outlook, sometimes advocating a borderless world and despising traditional ties.
This elite runs most of our cultural and political institutions, including large parts of the civil service and the justice system. When they fail, they simply move on. Their Blob-like unaccountability makes us question whether we are still – or perhaps have ever really been – a democracy.
Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory marked a moment of transformative change, reshaping Britain’s politics and state institutions Credit: Tim Graham/Getty Images
Integration of immigrant groups into the nation goes against their prejudices and career prospects: their pursuit of “diversity and inclusion” often causes breakdown and division. One of their principal strategies has been an attack on national history, and opinion polls confirm what many of us feel intuitively: that the effect on young people is to alienate them from their own nation.
We are now seeing a rebellion against this elite. Most rebellions fail. Great revolutions, as in France and Russia, usually make things worse. The British way has been to force a change of direction through a shift in public feeling, culminating in a parliamentary clear-out. It looks increasingly likely that this will happen.
One sign is that women, worried about their children’s future, are beginning to take a stand – always a sign of trouble for rulers. But how change will come about is in the lap of the gods. A Reform government? Kemi Badenoch’s finally revived Conservative Party? A coalition of the Right? Or the worst outcome: a last-ditch alliance of the parties of the Left clinging to the status quo?
While the present Government staggers from failure to failure, the duty of the Opposition parties is to use the time to plan fundamental reform of the state and its institutions. As first steps, ministers must take back control of their departments, and bodies in receipt of public funds, including museums and academic institutions, should be made truly accountable to Parliament for their public activities.
This movement will be as momentous as the 1832 Reform Act, the 1909 People’s Budget, the women’s suffrage campaign, Labour’s 1945 victory or the Thatcher landslide. Each came about only after the country had gone through a “winter of discontent”. The Starmer Government seems likely to go down in history for creating another blizzard.
We are clinging to a dangerous fantasy – the belief that we can simply replace fossil fuels with something else and carry on as before. That wind, solar, nuclear, or hydrogen will allow us to keep our cars, our flights, our global supply chains, and our high-energy lifestyles. This is not just naïve – it’s reckless.
The hard truth is that there is no substitute for the scale, convenience, and density of energy we once had in oil, coal, and gas. Even nuclear power, often presented as the big solution, cannot sustain our way of life. It is part of the picture – but nowhere near the whole picture.
We must abandon the idea of energy substitution and face what really lies ahead: radical energy descent.
This means reducing our use of all forms of energy – not by a little, but by a lot. It means stepping off the treadmill of endless demand. It means redesigning our lives to need far less.
Not just fewer cars – but fewer journeys. Not just greener homes – but smaller, simpler ones. Not just different production – but less production. Less heating, less cooling, less lighting, less powering.
This is not a message that wins elections or sells products. But it is the message that truth demands. The world is entering a long emergency – of resource limits, climate instability, and economic contraction. More energy won’t save us. Only using less will.
The challenge is no longer technical. It is civilisational.
And so we come to localism – not as a political slogan, but as a survival strategy.
Localism works because it cuts energy demand at the root. It shortens supply chains. It eliminates unnecessary travel. It reduces the need for global logistics, mega infrastructure, and remote bureaucracy. It rebuilds community, relocalises food and work, and makes life slower, simpler, and supportable.
We cannot keep powering the industrial scale of life. But we can power the local.
Localism is not a utopia. It is a pathway through collapse – a way of contracting with dignity. A way of living that fits within the limits of the Earth and the energy it offers.
We don’t need a new fuel. We need a new way of living. That means less of everything – and closer to home.
In today’s post by Tim Morgan he concludes that in our situation, intensifying competition for dwindling resources is likely to drive a disorderly rather than a structured and organised transition to a post-growth social realignment.
Not sure what a post-growth social realignment entails, I sought the advice of ChatGPT:
A post-growth social realignment refers to the broad and often fundamental changes in society that occur when an economy moves away from the goal of continuous economic growth and begins to prioritise well-being, sustainability, and resilience instead. This shift affects not only economic policy but also cultural values, social structures, and political power dynamics.
Key elements of a post-growth social realignment:
New values and priorities
Societies begin to value quality of life over quantity of goods.
Success is measured less by GDP and more by things like health, community strength, environmental integrity, and time affluence (free time).
Restructuring of work and livelihoods
Paid work may become less central; informal work, care work, and community activities grow in importance.
More people might work part-time or in subsistence, local, or cooperative economies.
Decentralisation and localisation
Power and resources may shift from national or corporate centres to local communities.
Local food, energy, and social networks become more important as globalised systems contract or prove unreliable.
Change in consumption patterns
Reduced emphasis on material consumption and status goods.
Simpler lifestyles, reuse, repair, and local exchange are favoured.
Social and political shifts
Governments and institutions may be forced to adapt by supporting more equitable resource distribution, local decision-making, and ecological limits.
New alliances form around common interests in health, fairness, environment, and security.
Redefinition of prosperity and progress
Prosperity is seen as the ability to live well within ecological limits.
Progress is measured by regeneration, not expansion.
In short, a post-growth social realignment describes how societies reorganise themselves socially, politically, and economically when the underlying assumption of infinite growth is abandoned. It is both a consequence of ecological and economic necessity and a conscious reimagining of what a good life and fair society look like.
As human and natural systems expand, they tend to grow through a process of structured layering. Each layer adds a new function, responsibility, or control mechanism, helping the system manage its increasing scale and complexity. This is most visible in governments, corporations, and infrastructure networks, where growth is typically planned, hierarchical, and formalised. New departments, regulations, technologies, or tiers of management are created to maintain order and deliver services efficiently.
However, when such systems begin to shrink—whether due to resource limits, financial constraints, or social change—they rarely contract in a planned or symmetrical way. Instead, they begin to delayer. This process is more evolutionary than designed. Layers that are no longer sustainable or useful quietly erode or are bypassed. Authority disperses. Functions shift from formal institutions to informal networks. Small, adaptive units begin to replace centralised control.
In this sense, growth and shrinkage are not mirror images. Growth adds structure. Shrinkage reveals resilience, often by removing layers that were once necessary but are no longer viable. The result is not simply a smaller version of the original system, but a transformed one: leaner, more local, and guided less by hierarchy than by necessity and adaptation.
The essential point is that the economy is shrinking, and it does so in an evolutionary, unplanned manner. Which is how localism will develop.
Gail Tverberg’s latest article explores what individuals can do in a world facing growing conflict, resource shortages, and economic contraction. Drawing on her systems-based understanding of energy, debt, and complexity, she outlines 11 practical approaches for personal resilience. These include fostering thankfulness, simplifying lifestyles, strengthening community ties, reducing reliance on fragile supply chains, and preparing mentally for change. The tone is realistic and pragmatic, acknowledging that while we cannot control global events, we can adapt our own behaviours and expectations.
The Dunbar number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of stable social relationships a person can maintain. It is typically cited as around 150.
It is relevant to thinking about the future of localism.
The concept was developed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who discovered a correlation between the brain sizes of primates and the size of their social groups. Extrapolating this to humans, he suggested that the average person can maintain about 150 meaningful relationships – that is, people with whom you know well enough to keep in touch and care about their status within your social world.
Key Points:
150 is not a strict limit but an average; real-world numbers can vary (from around 100 to 250).
The number applies to “stable” relationships – those involving regular contact and emotional closeness.
The 150 limit is often cited in military units, company departments, and village sizes in traditional societies.
Dunbar also proposed layers of relationship closeness:
The Dunbar number has been influential in designing social networks, organisational theory, and community planning, especially in contexts like localism, where maintaining strong personal ties is vital for resilience and mutual support.
The Dunbar number aligns closely with the logic of localism, particularly as the economy contracts and social systems transition from formal, institutional structures to more informal, relationship-based ones.
Here’s how the Dunbar number supports the case for localism:
🔹 1. The scale of Community Life
Localism works best at the human scale – villages, neighbourhoods, or districts where people can recognise, trust, and support each other.
The Dunbar number (≈approximately 150) mirrors the size of traditional self-regulating communities, ranging from hunter-gatherer bands to pre-industrial parishes.
A local community of around 150–200 people enables mutual obligations, shared memory, and informal decision-making to flourish.
🔹 2. Governance and Trust
In systems where people know each other personally, enforcement of norms relies less on police or regulation and more on reputation and accountability.
Local governance becomes relational, not bureaucratic. The shrinking economy may favour this shift, as informal systems are less costly to maintain.
🔹 3. Design of Future Services
Local food production, shared child care, energy cooperatives, or health support networks (like neighbour-led care) all become more viable and resilient when grounded in groups small enough to be cohesive.
Dunbar-sized groups can self-organise using common sense and shared values rather than top-down management.
🔹 4. Rebuilding Social Capital
Modern life has eroded meaningful relationships. The transition to localism presents an opportunity to reweave the social fabric based on what humans are cognitively and emotionally equipped to handle.
When economies no longer offer purpose through jobs and consumption, relationships become the primary currency of well-being – and Dunbar’s number defines their natural limits.
🔹 5. Application in Design and Planning
New settlements or restructured towns could be organised in clusters of ≈150 people, with local governance councils, shared gardens, and communal spaces.
Rather than thinking in abstract zoning categories, planners could begin with the question:
In many ways, the Dunbar number is the natural unit of localism. It defines a scale at which social systems become personal. Within a group of 150, reputation matters. Kindness is remembered. Selfishness is noticed. Mutual help thrives. Formal institutions become unnecessary because people enforce social norms through personal relationships rather than relying on regulation.
Modern society has outgrown this scale. Services are remote, housing is anonymous, and people make decisions we’ll never meet. However, as the formal economy contracts and public services weaken, we may find ourselves returning to the older, more human-sized structures that our minds and hearts are built for.
Designing future settlements, neighbourhoods, or service hubs around this scale could bring profound benefits. Shared child care, neighbourly support for older people, communal gardens, food production, and even dispute resolution become feasible without bureaucracy. The Dunbar number provides a biological foundation for rebuilding localism – not as a nostalgic dream but as a practical necessity in a shrinking economy.
The lesson is clear: if we are to live within nature’s limits, we must also live within our own.
The human world of the early 21st century is dominated by science, cities, and high technology. However, both our modern way of life and our way of thinking about the world sprang up only within the past several centuries. Today’s humans are biologically the same as people who lived 10,000 years ago; but our current habits, expectations, and beliefs are almost entirely tied to machines, infrastructure, energy sources, and artificial materials that have only recently come into existence. Compared to our hunter-gatherer forebears, we might as well be from another planet.
We take modernity for granted, as the fish presumably takes for granted the water in which it swims. But our own metaphorical water is increasingly troubled. Survival-level problems are appearing with more frequency and intensity, including climate change, resource depletion, the disappearance of wild nature, and the toxification of the biosphere. If society cannot extricate itself from this worsening turbulence, our species may not persist much longer.
What’s outside the fishbowl we call modernity? And how did we humans get into it in the first place?
Progress or Polycrisis
Most people who live in industrialized nations now believe that humans are superior to the rest of nature. It is assumed that by using science and reason, along with giant helpings of technology, we can banish scarcity and ignorance. Modernity is thought to be the implicit goal of billions of years of biological evolution. And some of us imagine techno-humans to be the seed pods resulting from this great flowering, capable of spreading life and intelligence into the rest of the universe.
There have long been critics of modernity such as Chief Seattle (“When the green hills are covered with talking wires and the wolves no longer sing, what good will the money you paid for our land be then.”). However, in the last few years a critical discourse about modernity has emerged in books, blogs, and academic literature, notably in the works of three authors—Vanessa Andreotti, Tom Murphy, and Dougald Hine (more names deserve mention, including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Daniel Quinn, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jeremy Lent, and Joanna Macy, but the aforementioned three will serve our immediate purposes).
Vanessa Andreotti, in her book Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, focuses on the modern mindset, which she characterizes as a collection of “expired stories” from which spring racism, colonialism, and wanton destruction of nature. She contrasts this modern mindset with Indigenous ways of knowing, which not only made societies more sustainable, but gave their members a sense of organic connection with their surroundings and with one another.
Tom Murphy, author of the blog “Do the Math,” sometimes describes himself as a recovering astrophysicist. In essays dating back to 2011, he shows that techno-solutions to climate change and other survival-level predicaments aren’t working and can’t work at scale. Murphy has concluded that only a fundamental shift in how humans inhabit the planet can enable our species to continue. While his starting point differs from Andreotti’s, he has come to share the latter’s outlook on modern versus Indigenous human cultures. Note: Murphy recently shared the story of his intellectual journey on the Crazy Town podcast.
Dougald Hine is the author of At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics, and All the Other Emergencies. In it, he explains why he has stopped focusing on climate change in his environmental writing. Although global warming is a survival-level problem, it cannot meaningfully be addressed without engaging in a deep critique of modernity. Like Andreotti and Murphy, Hine calls upon us to reawaken Indigenous attitudes toward nature.
For these authors, modernity is the cause of the current polycrisis and the impending Great Unraveling. Modernity is likely to comprise a brief and intensely destructive moment in Earth history, because the way we live is unsustainable not just in its details, but in its inherent design. Despite our pretentions and aspirations to be free of natural limits, we humans remain, and always will be, part of nature and subject to it. We pollute and deplete it at our own peril.
Are Humans Great or Terrible?
Implicit in this bifurcation of ways of looking at modernity are two views of Homo sapiens. If modernity is a magnificent achievement, it’s assumed that this is because humans are inherently great and are expressing that greatness through technology. In this view, we humans are more than just clever animals; we are evolving to become gods—as some writers have explicitly claimed.
The critics of modernity describe the current phase of human history not as an expression of intelligence and virtue, but as a cataclysmic mistake: for the sake of momentary comforts, conveniences, and profits, we are generating existential problems that could imperil not just civilization, but planetary life-support systems. One might well conclude from this that humans are terrible.
However, that pessimistic assessment of the worth of our species may be a misreading of both the situation and of the modernity critics. If we consider humans to be animals embedded in ecosystems, then whatever we do is part of nature and evolution. Biological evolution gave us big brains and opposable thumbs. Then cultural evolution via language and toolmaking took over, initiating a rapid self-reinforcing feedback process that has accelerated until the present. Modernity is the first instance in evolutionary history where a species has developed tools and language to expand its range and potential resources, thereby depleting not just its immediate region but global stores of fish, game, trees, soil, and minerals, while overfilling global waste sinks, notably the planetary atmosphere. However, the essential pattern of a species overexploiting its environment, increasing its population until it exhausts available resources and waste sinks, and then dying off, is common in nature. Humans are products of evolution, and whatever qualities drove us to provoke climate change and all the other predicaments of modernity are inherent in evolution itself.
Money, technology, social complexity, and war—human cultural traits that seem to separate us from other creatures—emerged via evolution. Natural selection is a process of improvising and testing; it doesn’t have a goal in mind. Once nature’s improvisation turned in the direction of language and toolmaking, modernity may have become inevitable. While all human groups didn’t follow the path that led eventually to the extreme exploitation that characterizes modern industrial civilization, the existence of even one group with the environmental preconditions, cultural history, and audacity to pursue the path of technological hyper-innovation and empire building made modernity virtually unavoidable. Most other groups were then swept along, first via colonization and later through economic globalization.
While techno-utopians envision humanity taking charge of Earth and then moving on to the stars, critics of modernity, when contemplating the future of our species, are more likely to look for clues in nature. When a species finds a new food source and multiplies, it eventually reaches limits of that food source; its population overshoots a sustainable level and crashes. This overshoot/die-off population cycle is particularly common among invasive species, which often negatively impact native species. However, once invasive species have been around for long enough, they and surrounding native species typically co-adapt—sometimes to the long-term detriment of at least some of the natives, sometimes to that of the invader. If the invaders are predatory, they eventually learn to take only some of their potential prey. If the invaders are prey species, they learn new survival strategies, perhaps including camouflage.
Similar boom-and-bust cycles have happened in human societies. Many societies experienced Golden Ages when resources seemed abundant and when comfort, convenience, and knowledge increased for a significant portion of the population. These Golden Ages were typically followed by Dark Ages of resource scarcity, poverty, and loss of high culture. All that’s different today is that we’ve achieved a global Golden Age based on the use of fossil fuels (which enable us to extract resources in larger quantities and move them longer distances); as fossil fuels dwindle and the consequences of burning them degrade ecosystems, a global Dark Age will likely follow. But its degree of darkness will depend on how willingly and successfully humanity adapts to limits.
Perhaps it’s helpful to think of the historical process of human cultural adaptation to environmental limits in slightly different terms. In the distant past, when a particular human group reached a limits crisis (usually with food), it had two options: indigenize or colonize. To indigenize meant adapting the group’s population size and consumption behavior to levels that could be sustained given existing resources. To colonize meant moving elsewhere, taking over other groups’ resources, or inventing ways to access resources that previously were inaccessible. No doubt circumstances and group history (and therefore mindset) predisposed each group toward one or the other strategy. Modernity marks the historical moment when the colonizers have taken over the whole world. But, having done so, they find themselves in a bind: there’s nowhere else to colonize, the resources held by Indigenous peoples have mostly already been looted, and unexploited new resources (perhaps including thorium or geologic hydrogen) are few and of questionable utility or accessibility. The only real long-term solution is for the colonizers to indigenize.
Evolution, Big Mistakes, and Human Agency
Critics of modernity are not the first people to question our evolutionary urge to colonize. For millennia, Indigenous thinkers, as well as some philosophers from the world’s dominant civilizations, have offered guidance on how to adapt to limits—psychologically as well as practically. In most if not all cases, the impulse to temper our human urge toward greed and outward expansion arose due to a humbling previous descent into scarcity that came from overharvesting resources.
During the last 60,000 years, humans fanned out across the globe, encountering ecosystems new to them. In each unfamiliar place they encountered, they tended to kill large animals that provided a high return on hunting effort. Many of these animals—including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, and three species of camels—were driven to extinction, and people had to resort to harvesting smaller game whose hunting required more work. Gradually, people who stayed in one place for many generations learned to leave enough plants and animals unharvested so that these species could reproduce and flourish.
Anthropologists Colding and Folke, in their studies of Indigenous peoples, found six kinds of tribal taboos regulating the harvest of vulnerable species. These are “segment taboos,” which forbade individuals of a certain age, sex, or social class from harvesting a resource; “temporal taboos,” which banned the use of a subsistence resource during certain days, weeks, or seasons; “method taboos,” which restricted overly efficient harvesting techniques that might deplete the stock of a resource; “life-history taboos,” that forbade the harvesting of a species spawning or nesting; “specific-species taboos,” which protected a species at all times; and “habitat taboos,” which forbade human exploitation of species within particular reefs or forests that served as biological reserves or sanctuaries.
Indigenous people weren’t automatically eco-wise simply because they were pre-modern. They inhabited worlds that had already been over-exploited, resulting in conflict and privation. The lessons of moderation were hard-won and eventually resulted in locally rooted cultures that assumed responsibility for the maintenance of nature’s balance, that made modest demands on ecosystems, and that recycled everything. Some indigenous societies, such as the Aboriginal peoples of modern-day Australia, developed practical, tested knowledge for living in balance with the more-than-human world that persisted for tens of thousands of years.
Some later colonizers likewise achieved ecological wisdom after having devastated their environments. By roughly 500 BC, ancient Greece was deforested and its topsoil was largely depleted. This was the context in which Greek stoic and cynic philosophers arose, advising a simple, peaceful, and virtuous life in harmony with nature (Epicurus: “Poverty, brought into conformity with the law of Nature, is great wealth.”).
Among the world religions, Buddhism has perhaps the most ecological message: other organisms, like us humans, are on the path to enlightenment, so don’t harm them if you can avoid doing so. Practice self-restraint and curb your appetites. Many environmentalists are attracted to Buddhism (which, despite its non-violent rhetoric, was spread throughout southern Asia via holy wars). Again, the context in which this religion of moderation emerged was ecological devastation. Anthropologist Marvin Harris offers this summary:
“By 600 BC, . . . the population had risen into the millions, towns and cities had sprung up, the entire Gangetic plain had become deforested, there was a shortage of pasture and fodder . . . and warfare was incessant.”
Today, as environmental devastation descends upon us all, ecological wisdom is again germinating—this time among climate change activists, students of ecology, and, unsurprisingly, people learning from Indigenous ways. Perhaps today’s critics of modernity are evolution’s growing tip, exploring a way toward the recovery of humanity and the biosphere.
We modern people prize boiled-down bromides we can easily recall, and we like to think we’re in charge of our fate. An honest critique of modernity discourages both mental tendencies. Details matter, the world is rife with nuance, and our agency is limited. However, if there is one simple bit of advice we might do well to remember, it’s this: stay humble. Much of what we think we know is wrong, and the rules of the game of survival are changing. The colonizing rules, which seemed to work so well for a while, at least for some, have propelled us into the evolutionary cul-de-sac called modernity. Going just a little further toward that dead end, via still more economic growth and technological innovation, will provide no solution. A response that reaches back to our very self-identity as humans is required.
In the early Middle Ages, in small kingdoms like Ergyng — which once lay between Wales and England — law was not based on state-run punishment. It was based on compensation. If you injured someone, you paid them, or their family, a sum of money or goods. Justice was not an abstract bureaucratic process; it was an act of direct reparation between individuals.
As our society moves toward more localist forms of living — smaller, more self-reliant communities, detached from the vast structures of state bureaucracy — it is worth revisiting this ancient and surprisingly humane idea.
A Brief History of Compensation Law
In early British societies like Ergyng, the law was customary and largely oral. It rested on a few simple principles:
Harm must be repaired. A physical injury, theft, or insult demanded payment to the victim.
Kinship matters. Families, not just individuals, were responsible for paying and receiving compensation.
Status is recognised. Different social roles — farmer, craftsman, noble — carried different levels of compensation for injury or death.
Local witnesses decide. Disputes were settled by community elders or assemblies, without a distant legal system.
Written codes, where they existed, mainly served to record these customs rather than invent new ones. Justice was about restoring balance, not enforcing punishment for its own sake.
Why Compensation Fits a Localist Future
Localist societies need justice systems that are:
Local and flexible
Focused on the victim
Reparative, not destructive
Community-owned
A compensation-based system meets all these needs, avoiding distant bureaucracies and helping communities to heal themselves.
How It Might Work Today
Imagine a small localist town in the near future. A theft occurs. Instead of calling the police, the victim brings the case before a local assembly—a meeting of trusted community members.
If the assembly finds the accused responsible, they order repayment:
The stolen goods must be returned (or replaced).
Based on the harm and distress caused, an additional sum is paid directly to the victim.
If necessary, the offender’s family or community group helps raise the sum.
If the offender cannot pay, alternative forms of compensation — such as labour, community service, or structured repayment — could be arranged. The goal is not punishment for its own sake, but restoration of trust and balance.
Importantly, repeat offenders or those who refuse to comply might lose their standing in the community — a serious penalty in a world where trust and reputation are vital.
Learning from the Past
Compensation-based justice is often dismissed today as primitive or outdated. Yet it reflects deep wisdom about human society: harm must be acknowledged and repaired, not hidden behind distant systems of authority.
In rethinking how we live in smaller, more resilient communities, we should not be afraid to look back. The experiences of forgotten kingdoms like Ergyng offer valuable lessons — not as museum pieces, but as living ideas for a new, localist society.
Real justice happens face-to-face — restoring relationships, rebuilding trust, and repairing the harm. It’s time to remember.
