The Seneca Effect Blog Returns on Substack!

 

The Seneca Effect Blog is returning! You can find it on Substack at this address:

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/

After that the original location of the blog (senecaeffect.com)  was sabotaged by the Google search engine, I thought that it was useless to fight the powers that be. So, I closed the blog. 

Yet, I found that Substack seems to be immune (for the time being) to Google's curse. And, unexpectedly, the "ghost" version of the Seneca blog stationed there continued to gain followers even though it was not updated anymore. So, I'll restart publishing Seneca-inspired posts on Substack. The new Seneca blog will be a little more philosophical and literary than the old one and it will mirror also my Chimeras blog.  More technical posts will go to www.thesunflowerparadigm.blogspot.com.

And onward we go, running with the wolves!

The Seneca Blog is Closed

 

The Seneca Effect blog closes down for the reasons explained in a previous post. But the spirit and the ideas of Seneca and his modest modern follower, Ugo Bardi, continue in other forms. Ugo Bardi blogs:

• On energy and sustainability on "The Sunflower Paradigm" 
• On biology and ecosystem science on "The Proud Holobionts"
• And Seneca is coming back on substack! 

And this is what Seneca has to say about our current situation

The Seneca Effect Blog is Closing Down

The Internet is full of angry people shouting insults at each other. Take it easy, fellows, do as a good stoic would do. Accept the will of the Gods, but keep doing your duty and help others as much as you can. And have a little fun, when you can.

The moment has arrived: after about two years of posting on the "Seneca Effect" blog; I see that a cycle is concluded: look at the stats: 

Clearly, it is not possible to continue in these conditions. It is time to reshuffle, retrench, regroup, reconsider, rebuild. The "Seneca Effects" will close, and I'll transfer my writing elsewhere. For the time being, I am returning to my old blog "Cassandra's Legacy" that I had kept mothballed up to now (yes, Cassandra is returning!)

But to create a strategy for the future, first of all, I need to understand what went wrong. Why this remarkable "Hubbert Curve"? I can think of more than one reason, but essentially two: 1) The blog has been sabotaged by the search engines, Google in particular, and 2) the blog has evolved into something that readers find confusing. 

About the first hypothesis, there are surely elements of truth in it. I already discussed it in a previous post, and the majority of commenters agreed that they couldn't find the blog in the first rows of their search engine, except if they used "Bing." Apparently, Microsoft likes me, but Google doesn't. There is nothing especially conspiratorial in this. It already happened for my old "Cassandra" blog. And I, for one, bow down in front of our new memetic overlords! 

About the second hypothesis, it has elements of truth as well. The blog has evolved along with my personal views. I am normally classed together with the "catastrophists," and the idea of the "Seneca Cliff" can be seen as being as catastrophist as catastrophism can be. But my position is much more articulated than that: I see myself as a modern stoic. I accept the will of the Gods, but I consider it my duty to help people (including myself) to avoid the incoming disaster. 

The problem is that some people seem to have internalized the idea that collapse is unavoidable, and they don't seem to be able to think of a better way to face it than turning themselves into poor peasants (or dreaming the same thing thereof). My view, instead, is that we have to build a resilient society by means of renewable energy and that it is possible to do that with the currently existing technology. 

You may or may not agree with my position; the point is that many people are confused by a blog that has a title that hints at a coming collapse while it deals with ways to avoid collapse (the same problem that "The Limits to Growth" study had: few people understood what the authors were trying to do). So, they see my position as "treason" and proceed to insult me as a result. I prefer to close the blog than have readers like these.  

Apart from a number of hopeless cases of people really gone papayas, the problem is that a blog (or any kind of publication) must have a certain consistency. Many bloggers succeeded in growing their readership by always posting the same thing, only with minor variations (I have a few ones in mind, but let me not name names). That's not strictly necessary, but I understand that the aims of the "Seneca Effect" blog, as it is now, are confusing for many readers.  

So, it is time for the Seneca blog to fold over and for me to move onward. The two "souls" of the blog will find their places in two different blogs. The discussion on energy will move to the existing blog "The Sunflower Paradigm." It has been a marginal blog so far, but you can note that it is reasonably easy to find. And its readership is growing.

Then, how about my meditations on history, art, philosophy, stoicism, and the like? They might go to my existing blog, "Chimeras." Or maybe to a new blog that could be titled "Meditations" à la Marcus Aurelius?  I am still thinking about that. Suggestions are welcome. In the meantime, here is the latest post I published on Chimeras.

_______________________________________________________________________

After 50 years of Catastrophism, we are now facing the cliff. What would Seneca do?

The Raft of the Medusa, a painting by Theodore Géricault (1818). It seems to illustrate the way some people feel in the current situation: survival implies throwing other people out of the raft. 

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman Philosopher, never was a catastrophist, but he understood that in life you have to expect ups and downs. And that when things go bad, they go bad fast (festinantur in damnum). This is what I called the "Seneca Effect." 

Seneca was a stoic, a person steeped in the views of his times. It was an age when people understood that their control of the vagaries of life was limited. Sickness, ruin, pain, and death were facts of life for people who had no aspirin, no life insurance, and no dentists. In the stoics' view, bad moments had to be accepted and lived as a test of your moral fortitude, not as an excuse to forget one's duties in life. Seneca, just like all of us, had his defects. But when the final moment came for him, he accepted his destiny with dignity and serenity. 

And here we are, what holds for a single person holds for humankind. We are facing a serious downturn, a decline that could be so rapid to call it a cliff. Half a century after the serious warning of "The Limits to Growth," we not yet falling, but we are on the edge. We start seeing the chasm ahead while the fog of time clears. 

Is this becoming a test of moral fortitude for humankind? Unfortunately not. Humans are dividing themselves into tribes that fight each other, so far only verbally. Some just refuse to look ahead. Others think that, when jumping from the cliff, they'll be able to fly. Others search for someone to blame. 

A mixture of ignorance and aggressivity is generating a tremendous wave of hate; at least from what I can see in the comments to another post of mine. These people seem to think they are already on the raft of the Medusa, the French ship that was wrecked at sea in 1816. Only 15 out of the 146 people stranded on the raft survived. And they did that by throwing the others into the sea and recurring to cannibalism. 

But we are not there yet. There is still space for avoiding the sandbanks. We still can do our duty to live and help others living. Be a good stoic; do not lose hope, and do not fall into cruelty. 

Putin Must Die! How to make sure that the war will not end soon

As a comment to the recent decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, I propose here an excerpt from the chapter titled "The Evil Side of Collapse" of my book, "Before Collapse," (2019). In the book, I argue that there is a way to reduce the impact of systemic collapse that I call the "Seneca Strategy," which consists in accepting an unavoidable decline in order to soften a later crash. Conversely, there exists also an "anti-Seneca" strategy that consists in forcing the system to resist decline at all costs. The result is that the collapse is postponed but, when it comes, it is rapid and disastrous. It may be applied in a military conflict when the objective is the utter and total destruction of one's enemy. It consists in making it clear to enemy leaders that they will be treated as criminals if they surrender so that they will keep fighting to the bitter end. It was applied by the Allies during WWII, as I briefly discuss here. 

From "Before Collapse,"  di Ugo Bardi, Springer 2019 (*)

In military matters, there exists an “anti-Seneca” strategy that consists in disregarding Sun Tzu’s principle of minimum effort, aiming instead at continuing the war all the way to the complete military defeat, or even the annihilation, of the enemy. Such a plan could be based on ideological, political, or religious considerations leading one or both sides to believe that the very existence of the other is a deadly threat that must be removed using force. In ancient times, religious hatred led to the extermination of entire populations, and there is a rather well-known statement that may have been pronounced after the fall of the Albigensian city of Béziers, in Southern France, in 1209. It is said that the Papal legate who was with the attacking Catholic troops was asked what to do with the citizens, which surely included both Catholics and Albigensian heretics. The answer was, "Kill them all; God will know His own." 

That war, just like most modern wars, was an “identity war” where the enemy is seen as not just an adversary, but an evil entity to be destroyed. These wars tend to be brutal and carried on all the way to the total extermination of the losing side. In some cases, though, wars may be prolonged simply because they are good business for some people and companies on both sides.

A possible case of this kind of “anti-Seneca” strategy may be found in the campaign that was started in the US in 1914 to provide food for Belgium during the First World War. The campaign is normally described as a great humanitarian success, but in the recent book Prolonging the Agony (2018),  the authors, Docherty and Macgregor, suggest that the relief effort was just the facade for the real task of the operation: supplying food to Germany so that the German army could continue fighting until it was completely destroyed. This interpretation appears to be mainly speculation, but we can't ignore that Belgium was occupied by the German army at that time, and so it could be expected that at least part of the food sent there would end up in German hands. 

Something more ominous took place during the Second World War. By September 1943, after the surrender of Italy, it must have been clear to everybody on both sides that the Allies had won the war; it was only a question of time for them to finish the job. So, what could have prevented the German government from following the example of Italy and deciding to surrender, maybe ousting Hitler, as the Italian government had done with Mussolini? We do not know whether some members of the German leadership considered this strategy, but it seems clear that the Allies did not encourage them. One month after Italy surrendered, in October 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, signed a document known as the “Moscow Declaration.” Among other things, it stated that:

At the time of granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done … and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.

… most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done. … <else> they will be punished by joint decision of the government of the Allies.

What was the purpose of broadcasting this document that threatened the extermination of the German leadership, knowing that it would have been read by the Germans, too? The Allies seemed to want to make sure that the German leaders understood that there was no space to negotiate an armistice. The only way out left to the German military was to take the situation into their own hands to get rid of the leaders that the Allied had vowed to punish. That was probably the reason for the assassination attempt carried out against Adolf Hitler on June 20th, 1944. It failed, and we will never know if it would have shortened the war.

Perhaps as a reaction to the coup against Hitler in Germany, a few months later, on September 21, 1944, the Allies publicly diffused a plan for post-war Germany that had been approved at the Quebec Conference by the British and American governments. The plan, known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” was proposed by Henry Morgenthau Jr. secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Among other things, it called for the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure and the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a nearly Medieval technology level. If carried out as stated, the plan would have killed millions of Germans since German agriculture, alone, would have been unable to sustain the German population. The plan was initially approved by the US president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Unlike the Moscow declaration that aimed at punishing German leaders, the Morgenthau plan called for the punishment of the whole German population. Again, the proponents could not have been unaware that their plan was visible to the Germans and that the German government would have used it as a propaganda tool. President Roosevelt's son-in-law, Lt. Colonel John Boettiger, stated that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans." The general upheaval against the plan among the US leadership led President Roosevelt to disavow it. But it may have been one of the reasons that led the Germans to fight like cornered rats to the bitter end.

So, what was the idea behind the Morgenthau plan? As you may imagine, the story generated a number of conspiracy theories. One of these theories proposes that the plan was not conceived by Morgenthau himself, but by his assistant secretary, Harry Dexter White⁠. After the war, White was accused of being a Soviet spy by the Venona investigation, a US counterintelligence effort started during WW2 that was the prelude to the well-known “Witch Hunts” carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. According to a later interpretation⁠, White had acted under instructions from Stalin himself, who wanted the Germans to suffer under the Allied occupation so much that they would welcome a Soviet intervention. It goes without saying that this is just speculation, but, since this chapter deals with the evil side of collapse, this story fits very well with it.

There is no evidence that the Morgenthau plan was conceived by evil people gathering in secret in a smoke-filled room. Rather, it has certain logic if examined from the point of view of the people engaged in the war effort against Germany in the 1940s. They had seen Germany rebuilding its army and restarting its war effort to conquer Europe just 20 years after it had been defeated in a way that seemed to be final, in 1918. It is not surprising that they wanted to make sure that it could not happen again. But, according to their experience, it was not sufficient to defeat Germany to obtain that result: no peace treaty, no matter how harsh on the losers, could obtain that. The only way to put to rest the German ambitions of conquest forever was by means of the complete destruction of the German armed forces and the occupation of all of Germany. For this, the German forces had to fight like cornered rats. And it seems reasonable that if you want a rat to fight in that way, you have to corner it first. The Morgenthau plan left no hope for the Germans except in terms of a desperate fight to the last man.

We do not know whether the people who conceived the plan saw it in these terms. The documents we have seem to indicate that there was a strong feeling among the people of the American government during the war about the need to punish Germany and the Germans, as described, for instance, in Beschloss’s book The Conquerors. Whatever the case, fortunately, the Morgenthau plan was never officially adopted, and, in 1947, the US changed its focus from destroying Germany to rebuilding it by means of the Marshall plan.

There have been other cases of wars where there was no attempt to apply the wise strategy proposed by Sun-Tzu, who suggests always leaving the enemy a way to escape. Nowadays, wars seem to be becoming more and more polarized and destructive, just like the political debate. Once a war has started, the only way to conclude it seems to be the complete collapse of the enemy and the extermination of its leaders. The laughter of the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, at the news of the murder of the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011 is a case in point of how brutal these confrontations have become. It is hard to see how the trend in this direction could be reversed until the current international system of interaction among states that created it collapses. At least, it should be clear that the anti-Seneca strategy is an especially inefficient way to win wars.

(*) This is a lightly edited text from an early version of the book. 

The Dewdrop World is a Dewdrop World, and yet, and yet..... The Ethereal Nature of Collapse

It is said that the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa wrote this haiku upon the death of his daughter: "The dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet, and yet......." (tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara). It is poetry at its best: it hints at much more than it says. Here, I start from this poem about dew being an incorporeal thing to examine how another incorporeal thing, such as money, can affect us.

 

A few days ago, I was looking again at the presentation that Nathan John Hagens produced for the Earth Day of 2021. I had watched it when it appeared, but something made me return to it. It is a long story, but the point that remained in my mind is when Nate shows a graph with a clear "Seneca" shape for the global oil production curve. That is, something that grows slowly, then declines rapidly (at minute 38 of the presentation). Later, at minute 44, he shows a similar curve for the GDP. 

 

Nate attributes the slanting forward of the curve to financial effects. My first reaction to that was that financial tricks, in themselves, do not produce oil (and can't raise the GDP, either). How can a basically non-existing thing such as money, mainly numbers stored in computer memories, affect the real world in such a way?

But, rethinking the matter, I am not sure anymore that the financial world really is an ethereal and inconsequential thing. Maybe it is the opposite. As I learn more about more things, I am always surprised by what I discover. My latest epiphany came from a talk given by Fabio Vighi, who teaches at the University of Cardiff, about a correlation between the lockdowns of 2020 and the global financial situation and, in particular, of the "REPO" market (you can find his take at this link). 

I must confess that I had no idea of what the REPO was, not even that such a thing existed. Now, I know that it stands for "Repurchase Agreements" and I think I have some idea of how it is supposed to work. Basically, it is a market where financial operators can resupply with money by borrowing it. Where does that money come from? Typically, financial firms with large pools of cash do not want to let that money sit around, so they lend it to financial institutions, banks, at low interest rates. Then, the banks will use this money to fund short-term needs. The REPO market is a short-term thing.

I am far from having assimilated the obscure mechanisms operating inside the entrails of the REPO market, but this much I can understand: it determines the cost of money. Now, connect this concept with the real economy. The economy is made out of real things: resources, materials, equipment, goods, people, and more. And everything in the economy is subjected to depreciation (a name that economists use for the thing that physicists call entropy). If you want to fight depreciation (entropy) you must expend energy. (you can do that in an open system -- in closed ones, entropy always increases, but this is not the case for the economic system.) 

So, to keep the economy running, you need energy. In order to get energy, you need energy (you probably heard the concept of "energy return on energy invested", "EROI"). But, in order to get energy to be invested, our economic system is geared in such a way that you need that non-physical thing called "money."  No money, no investments. No investments in energy, no production of energy. 

What if there is no money? Energy is not produced. Then people become very poor, and many die. Incidentally, it also happens that the rich get richer, but that's another story. Apart from the rich, the poor slide down the downward step of the curve: the Seneca Cliff. I do think that Nate is right in his interpretation: the Seneca Cliff would arrive even independently of financial factors, but financial factors can make it steeper. Money doesn't create resources (as economists are fond to say). But it can direct more resources to exploitation, making it faster. That gives people the illusion that there is more of it. 

You see how everything is connected: our fate is determined by such mysterious things as the one called the "REPO market." Then, something horrible happened in 2019: a cash crunch caused the repo rate to soar — reaching as high as 10 percent intraday on Sept. 17. It pushed up the federal funds rate to levels much higher than it was supposed to be (between 2-2.25 percent) at the time.

The interesting thing about the story is Fabio Vighi's interpretation that the lockdowns of 2020 were the result of the attempt of the powers that be to cool the REPO market and avoid a financial Seneca Cliff. If this was their aim, they succeeded spectacularly.

Note how the REPO rate went down from the Spike of September 2019 to a very low, and apparently stable, level in 2021. So, Fabio Vighi's interpretation could make sense. But can it be true? Personally, I think it might well be the case, but it is also true that correlation does not mean causation and the spike disappeared much before the lockdowns. On the other hand, the powers that be may have been scared enough that they put into practice an emergency plan they had concocted long before. Whatever the case, they will never tell us the truth. 

The thing that doesn't cease to amaze me, though, is how it is possible that humans placed themselves to me so dependent on the thing called "money."  It is an ephemeral entity that has no physical consistency.  I can also understand that small disturbances in the repo (and other money) markets can ripple through the entire system. The physicists call this the "butterfly effect" and you know how small perturbations can send huge systems tumbling down to their doom. Money has no more consistency than the morning dew. And yet, and yet......

Take a look at this incredible painting by Quentin Matsys, "The Money Lender and His Wife." painted in 1514 and representing two burghers of Antwerp, the ancestors of the people who have been playing with the REPO market in modern times. Just like Issa's poem, this painting hints at much more than it shows, but in the opposite way. Whereas Issa hints that the world is not real, here we see it as even too real. Reality is gold coins, much more important than the book of devotions that the wife of the banker should have been looking at, but she is not. Yet, the true value of those coins is all in the minds of people, by themselves they are not worth more than dew in the morning.

You can find Nate Hagen's 2021 posts at https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/

A more recent documentary is at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0w3GfW240M 

 

Cataclysms and the Megamachine: Is History a Cycle or a Progression?

This image by the Tuscan painter Piero della Francesca exudes such power that it may truly blow your mind. Apart from the mastery of the composition, the perfection of the details, the fascination of the human figures, a canvas in the hands of a grand master is not just an image: it is a message. In this case, all the figures are static, there is no one moving. Yet, the painting carries the message of a tremendous movement forward in time. It shows a great change occurring: something enormous, deep, incredible: the triumph of life over death. And those who sleep through it are missing the change without even suspecting that it is happening. Just like us, sleepwalkers in a changing world, where gigantic forces are awakening right now. 

"Cataclysms" (*) is a recent book by Laurent Testot (Univ. Chicago Press, 2020) that goes well together with "The End of the Megamachine" (Zero Books, 2020) by Fabian Scheidler of which I wrote in a previous post. 

Both books see human history using the approach that I call "metabolic." It means to take the long view and see humankind in terms of a living entity. Call it a "machine" (as Scheidler does), call it "Monkey" (as Testot does), call it a "complex system" (as it is fashionable, nowadays), or maybe a holobiont (as I tend to do). It is the same: humankind is a creature that moves, grows, stumbles onward, destroys things, builds new things, keeps growing, and, eventually, collapses. 

Bot "Cataclysms" and the "Megamachine" catch this multiform aspect of the great beast and both emphasize its destructive aspects. Both understand that the thing is moving. More than that, its trajectory is not uniform, it goes in bumps. It is a continuous sequence of growth and collapse, the latter usually faster than the former (what I call "The Seneca Effect"). 

So, what's happening? Is history going in cycles, or is it progressing in some ways? It is a question that has been asked and answered in various ways over centuries of historiography, at least from when Edward Gibbon (in 1776) started wondering why the mighty Roman Empire had disappeared. 

For the Christian eschatological view, there was no doubt that the Empire had served its purpose and it had to disappear to leave space for a new world which, in turn, was bound to disappear in the Final Judgement. For the thinkers of the 19th century, instead, a different kind of teleology was at work. It was an interpretation of Darwin's ideas that saw evolution as a movement toward higher and higher levels of perfection, with the white European man as the pinnacle of the trend. 

Later, these ideas started to look naive, and a catastrophistic streak of thought started to grow. The collapse of the Western Civilization was clearly seen for the first time in a telescope aimed at the future in 1972, in the study sponsored by the Club of Rome titled "The Limits to Growth." The study had gone full cycle, returning to the old eschatological view of the end of the world. It was a cataclysm. Unavoidable, unless the megamachine could do something that the megamachine could not do: to stop growing.

But the universe is complex and the best-laid computer models of mice and men gang aft agley. Over the history we knew, no collapse has ever been the final one. After every collapse, there has been a rebound. So, history is both a cycle and a progression. There is something on the other side of the unavoidable collapse we are facing nowadays. All collapses bring change: it may well be their purpose in the universe. Just as the Romans couldn't imagine what would come after that their empire was gone, for us it is impossible to imagine what will come after us. We can only perceive that something enormous is stirring. Now we see it through the glass of our models, darkly: but then we will see it face to face.

(*) I had started this post with the idea of writing a review of Testot's book, but as I kept writing, the text grew by itself and it became something else. But, about "Cataclysms," by all means it is a great book -- not just dealing with catastrophic events but giving you an organic view of history, full of concepts and ideas that you cannot find anywhere else. By all means, do read it! It will change the way you see the world.

The Hydrogen Myth: Technology and Religion in the Decline of Civilizations

 

I just started a new blog titled "The Hydrogen Skeptics." It is about the hydrogen economy and hydrogen as a fuel and it is a little technical as a subject. So I thought it was not appropriate to discuss it in a somewhat philosophical blog like "The Seneca Effect." Yet, there are points in common, as I am arguing in this post. Above: the nuclear-powered car "Ford Nucleon", unfortunate technological prodigy of the 1950s, that never was turned into anything practical.

The Romans of imperial times found themselves in a situation not unlike ours. Gradually running out of resources, they found themselves more and more in trouble with keeping together a vast empire that was enormously expensive to defend and govern. Already at the time of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1st century AD), it must have been clear to everyone that something was not running right in the very bowels of the giant organism that was the Empire. But what was wrong, exactly?

All societies are based on a fundamental "founding myth" that forms the justification of everything that was done and is being done. The Romans were not a technology-based civilization, and they would have been puzzled by our fixation on new gadgets. They were a military civilization that built its founding myth on the prowess of their soldiers and the efficiency of their armies. That, in turn, was believed to be the result of the Gods' benevolence who had rewarded the Romans for their virtues. The Romans were supposed to be brave, strong, and pious, and they never failed to perform the sacrifices that were due to please their Gods. 

You can understand this attitude if you read Virgil's "Aeneid," (1st century AD), truly the foundation of the Roman view of the world. The hero and the central protagonist of the story is the Trojan warrior Aeneas, who goes through a series of adventures always careful to follow the advice of the Gods. He is neither dumb nor insensitive, but he never loses track of his mission. And the Gods, in turn, help him to achieve his goal. Being the son of a Goddess (Aphrodite) helps him a lot, too!

So, the Romans saw themselves as still performing Aeneas' mission when they conquered new lands and new peoples. The idea was to bring them civilization, (similar to our slogan "bring them democracy.") The Romans were genuinely convinced to be a superior civilization and that the manifest destiny of  Barbarians was to become Romans. But things started going wrong and many Barbarians stubbornly refused to surrender to the glorious Roman armies. So, what was the problem? Had the Gods abandoned the Romans? Maybe it was because they were not anymore so virtuous as they used to be during the good times. Maybe the Romans had become lazy, maybe they had forgotten the proper sacrifice rituals. 

One reaction was to return to the ancient virtues and to the ancient religion. We see this tendency during the whole period of decadence of the Empire, from the 1st century onward. We see it in the Stoic school of philosophy -- of which Seneca was a prominent member. Just like the mythical hero, Aeneas, Stoics emphasized personal virtue in difficult times. They would find their reward just in being virtuous, independently on whether they had succeeded or not in their task. 

Stoics were not so convinced about the religious practices and the many deities of their times. They tended to replace what they saw as silly beliefs with a loftier vision of a single, all-powerful spiritual entity. But they weren't iconoclasts. They were supporters of the traditional religions for those who didn't have the culture and the intelligence necessary to understand a higher level of spirituality. It is also possible that cultivating one's virtues, as Stoics were doing, was seen as a way to convince the Gods that they should continue to support the Romans, or maybe restart supporting them.

Despite many efforts, the diffusion of Stoicism didn't seem to help very much, and the situation moved from bad to worse. That may have been one of the reasons why the Romans tended to try to fix their founding myth by switching to new religions. So, they tended to deify their emperors, that is, to turn him into a God to be worshiped just like all the other Gods. Surely, being led by one of the members of the divine coterie would surely mean that the Gods won't let their brother in Rome alone to fight those hordes of bad-smelling barbarians. It was not an easy task to turn the man at the top into a God, since he normally was a homicidal psychopath, or a sexual predators, or a pervert -- often all these things together. And the effort didn't seem to help so much, either. 

Another strategy, a little more radical, was to import new religions from abroad. During the first two centuries of the Empire, Rome was truly a supermarket of Oriental religions. In some cases, new deities were incorporated into the existing Pantheon: Cybele, Isis, Mithras, and more. In other cases, entire new cults were transplanted into the Empire: Manichaeists, Zoroastrians, Mithraists, Jews, Christians, and more.

Eventually, one of these Oriental religions, Christianity, managed to get the upper hand over the others and it merged with the Emperor's cult. Constantine "The Great" (272 – 337 AD) saw himself as a divinely appointed emperor, but also a supporter of Christianity. From then on, apart for brief intervals, the Roman Empire was ruled by Christian Emperors. Theodosius "The Great" (347 – 395) officially banned Paganism from the Empire. 

As we all know, these efforts didn't work so well. Despite the new faith and the divine emperors, the founding myth of the Roman Empire was hopelessly obsolete. The Empire faded away. It had to: God's benevolence was not enough to keep it together. The new founding myths were Christianity (without divine emperors) for Europe and Islam for the Middle East and Northern Africa. They ushered new kinds of societies, better adapted to the new times.

In time, Christianity lost its role as the founding myth of the European society. We tend to see the European world dominance as the result not of God's benevolence, but of our technological prowess. Our technological tricks are what keeps the modern Global Empire together and we seem to be convinced that, if we have problems, all we need to do is to invent new tricks -- new founding myths. The consequence is that all the problems we face can be removed by more technology.  

But, in this phase of decline, it is clear that the Global Empire has enormous problems: running out of fossil fuels, pollution, global warming, social unrest, economic crisis, and more. So, we are trying to revamp and keep alive our founding myths. 

Just like in ancient Roman Times, we are in a phase of a plethora of new myths that compete to get the upper hand as the new, improved founding myth. Our equivalent of Stoicism is the idea that we should be virtuous by saving energy and separating household waste. Another "mythlet" is the idea that our problem with fossil fuels, can be solved by switching to another fuel (hydrogen) supposed to be both more abundant and cleaner. 

The hydrogen myth is on a par with others that try to repair a damaged machine on the run. Some of these ideas are purely mythological, including the various nuclear technologies supposed to create energy out of nothing (the nuclear water boiler, the e-cat, is a good example). But some of these ideas are technically valid, just don't expect them to be the new founding myths for something that has to disappear anyway. Just as Christianity survived the end of the Roman Empire, some technologies that we are developing nowadays will survive the collapse of the Global Empire. Wind, solar, hydro, and others can provide energy, but they'll support a society that will be completely different from the current one. 

So, why couldn't hydrogen be one of these technologies that will survive? It is because of technical reasons: hydrogen as a fuel has many problems that make it unsuitable for uses other than niche applications. Thinking of hydrogen on a grand scale as supporting a society as complex and wasteful as ours is simply a dream. Nevertheless, hydrogen remains popular nowadays just because of this impossible promise -- it is like a politician that gets elected by promising things that he will never be able to deliver. 

For this reason, we need an in-depth discussion to understand what hydrogen can, and cannot, do and avoid that it becomes a stumbling block in the transition away from fossil fuels that we are facing. That's why I created a new blog titled "The Hydrogen Skeptics" In the introduction to the new blog, I write: 

I am not against hydrogen in itself, which is just a natural element among 92 others. And I am open to the possibility that energy technologies based on hydrogen may find applications in the future. I am skeptical about the hype that surrounds hydrogen technologies. Not all technologies turn out to be feasible, no matter how hyped. Just think of the Ford Nucleon, nuclear powered car of the 1950s, shown in the cover image.

So, if you want to take a look at the new blog, click on the image of the unfortunate Ford Nucleon, taken as an example of technological hubris, one more revolutionary idea that never worked.

 

Right now, there is only one post on the new blog, but I plan new posts soon and the blog is open for discussion. If you are interested to contribute, just write to me. 

Confessions of a former hydrogenist

 

 

 

The Seneca Cliff of Rhetoric: Just say no to Powerpoint

"The orator" (l'arringatore), an Etruscan statue probably made during the 1st century BC, presently at the Archaeological Museum in Florence, Italy. Surely, he had no idea that his descendants would have used PowerPoint slides!

At the time of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, not only PowerPoint didn't exist, but not even such things as books or paper. For Seneca, a "book" was something written on parchment scrolls and when he took notes he probably used waxed wood tablets. Presenting one's ideas in public was part of the art of rhetoric, nearly completely based on words and gestures. 

Rhetoric is a term that has acquired a negative ring in our times, but that was originally understood as a skill that a learned person should study and practice. Unfortunately, today rhetoric has been gradually replaced by the barbaric method of droning on while reading written words appearing on a lighted screen. If Seneca is looking at us from the Elysian fields, he can only gravely shake his head at seeing how rhetoric went down what I call a "Seneca Cliff."

That had been clear to me for a long time, but it appeared painfully evident with the diffusion of on-line seminars. The latest on-line lecture I gave, a few days ago, was attended mainly by ghosts. Theoretically, 21 students were listening to me, but only three or four of them were gracious enough to show their faces on the screen. The others simply refused to appear, even when I explicitly invited them to do so. I don't think this behavior is understood to be bad manners. Apparently, it is believed that it is perfectly legitimate for a student to lurk in the shadows while a teacher speaks. That wouldn't be so nice in a real classroom: imagine that your students were to appear wearing hoods hiding their faces! 

But I can understand the defensive reaction of students. They are used to the well-known phenomenon of the "death by PowerPoint" -- your consciousness slowly drifting away while someone speaks reading from a nearly infinite series of slides.

 

But too much is too much. Enough with death by PowerPoint, now it is the time of the death of PowerPoint. With the advent of virtual lectures and virtual classes, there is no reason to continue to use a tool that's by now obsolete. I think it is time to say NO to PowerPoint. 

And that's what I did for that lecture: I had a PowerPoint presentation ready, but I didn't show it. I just spoke, and when I needed an image or a movie clip, I opened up the browser, I searched for it on the spot, and I showed it on screen. Easy, flexible, and interactive.

Did it work? I think so. Not that it revived all the ghost-students (maybe they weren't even there!), but at least a few more showed up and engaged in a discussion with me. I am planning to move away completely from PowerPoint, even though I still have to use it because a lot of my data and images are in there. I don't think I will ever become an orator as good as Seneca must have been in his times, but I am exploring this new way of presenting. And maybe old Seneca himself would approve!

 A brief history of how rhetoric fell down the Seneca Cliff.  

Image Source

When I was in college, it was traditional that teachers would use the blackboard as their only classroom tool. Occasionally, some of them would organize demonstrations of chemical reactions in front of the class but, mostly, they were supposed to go on for 1-2 hours writing mathematical and chemical formulas on the board. In the figure, you see Richard Feynman teaching in the 1960s.

When I started teaching, in the 1980s, that was still the standard way you were expected to do your job. You would keep writing formulas on the blackboard without ever resorting to written notes. It took quite some work of memorization and a certain ability of juggling numbers and symbols, but it was the way it was supposed to be done. It was not different from the way professional actors would learn to play their roles on the scene.

An alternative was the slide projector, loaded with 35 mm photographic slides in carousels or straight trays. I remember that I used it for my first presentations. It had the advantage that it could project images, but it was inflexible. Once you had loaded the tray, you could only show the slides in a pre-ordered frequency, just as you would fire the bullets from the clip in your automatic pistol. If you wanted to insert one slide in the middle, you had to unload all of them, and then reload the whole tray. Just like automatic guns, these things would sometimes jam. A couple of times, I saw the tray being spit out of the machine, spewing out the slides all over the room. But you had plenty more problems: slides appearing upside down, slides not belonging to the presentation, missing slides, and more.

Somewhat later, there came the overhead projector. It became standard equipment in the 1980s and was still in use in the 1990s. The projector used transparent sheets to project pre-printed text and images, usually only in black and white because color photocopiers were rare and expensive. It was also possible to project the silhouette of whatever you placed on the projector table and that could be used creatively to perform small on-screen demonstrations. You could even write with a marker on the sheet while presenting. You could draw arrows, symbols, and text.

Unlike slide projectors, the overhead projector was flexible. You would carry with you a folder with a number of transparent sheets and arrange them according to what you needed. Even while presenting, you always knew what the next image was and could decide to skip it or present another one. 

It was practical, yes, but also the harbinger of things to come. Once you had your transparent sheets ready, you didn't have to engage anymore in the mental gymnastic needed to memorize the formulas to write. For a while, I tried to resist and I kept making a point not to use projectors in the classroom. But, eventually, I gave up, just like all my colleagues. So many things to do, and how to resist the temptation of making life a little easier?

And then, there came PowerPoint. You see in the figure (from Google Ngrams) how Powerpoint came to dominate the narrative.

  

Apparently, the slide projector existed already in the 1940s, then it was slowly overcome by the overhead projector. Then, both were supplanted by the onrush of Powerpoint. In turn, Powerpoint seems to be declining, nowadays, but it is still the most mentioned method.

In many respects, Powerpoint is like the slide projector, but without the risk of jamming or seeing your slides flying in the room. But it was inflexible, too. Once you had your presentation loaded, you couldn't change it anymore on the spot. I remember an occasion when I was the chairman of a session at a conference and I invited one of the speakers to shorten his presentation. He looked at me with a sheepish expression and he said, "how can I do that? I use PowerPoint." Speakers were becoming slaves of their software.I don't know how it became the standard that the speaker (or the teacher) was supposed to do little more than reading whatever she had previously written. It was the triumph of bullet lists. University lectures never were supposed to be fun, but the whole thing became an exercise in futility. The students would just look at you with vitreous eyes and then ask you the PowerPoint file so that they could study it at home. With the advent of online teaching, the students don't even have to look at you with vitreous eyes anymore. They can sleep or just pretend that they are there.

 

And here we are. It is the curse of living in a decadent period, just like when the last Roman poets, from Ausonius to Claudian, lost the skills of their predecessors and couldn't do anything better than aping them. That's what we are doing with these curious rituals we call "webinars" or "on-line classes" that consist of reading from bright images on a screen. Maybe it is because, really, we don't have anything relevant to tell people anymore. We see it everywhere, especially on social media where the attention span is of the order of a few seconds, the insult is the communication standard, and nothing relevant is ever discussed. 

But never despair, if rhetoric went down a Seneca Cliff, there is always a Seneca Rebound after you hit the bottom. And we can improve. Down with PowerPoint!!

Honoring a Fallen Enemy: the Death of Rush Limbaugh

 

Rush Limbaugh has died at 70. Defined as "The most dangerous man in America," climate science denier, friend of Donald Trump, accused of racism and of all sorts of evil deeds. Eventually, though, a human being like all of us. 

Quomodo fabula, sic vita: non quam diu, sed quam bene acta sit, refert. (Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.) Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters to Licilius.

 

Years ago, the vagaries of life led me to have a meal in a restaurant in Bucharest. There, I discovered that the cook was Italian and I had a long chat with him. One thing he told me was that he had been the personal cook of Dick Cheney, in the US. 

Yes, Dick Cheney, the man behind the "Project for a New American Century," of the attack on Iraq, of the fake story of the "weapons of mass destruction," and God knows of how many more dark and dire things we don't know about. I have no reason to doubt the story I was told: what surprised me was that he told me that Cheney was "the best employer he had ever had," kind, considerate, and he paid well. And I have no reason to doubt that, either. 

You see, I am fascinated by evil. It is a theme that goes deep into everything we do and we think. Does evil really exist? Do evil people exist?  An Italian writer of one century ago, Armando Vacca, noted how the Great War was fought with the people on both sides all thinking they were fighting for a good cause. And he asked himself the question: "who would ever want to fight an unjust war?" A related question is, "who would ever want to live an evil life?" Evil may be something more subtle than it seems to be.

Nowadays, our view of the world is dominated by the search for evil. We seem to have lost our moral compass so completely that we can see ourselves as good only if we can identify someone evil to be in contrast with. It has been like that during the past century or so. But who are these evil rulers? Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Cheney, and many others, were they really evil or just said to be evil by their enemies? About Mussolini, I looked into the matter as much as I could and I arrived at the conclusion that he was not a man who had pleasure in harming others, which is a possible definition of "evil". He was, mainly, a man whose mind had aged and who had retreated behind the mask of the Duce degli Italiani. The man had become the mask and he wore that mask all the time. He had come to believe in his own propaganda and he really thought that he was doing something good for Italy. 

So, evil is not a question of someone enjoying hurting or killing other people while satanically laughing. It is a question of the mask that every one of us wears. The very concept of "persona" is related to that of mask. It may come from the Latin verb per-sonare, literally: sounding through, referred to the masks actors wore in theatrical performances. We all go through life wearing a mask, sometimes more than one. And we often identify so much with the mask we wear that we forget what we might be without it. 

So, evil people are best detected when they are in a position where they can do much more damage than the average person. My experience of when I occasionally crossed paths with high-level people agrees with what the Italian cook I met in Bucharest told me. High-level people can be absolutely charming, it is a skill that they develop to arrive at the top. Does that mean that the powerful always lie their way upward? Not really. They just wear their mask, their persona, and that's what they become. We all do the same.

So, how about Rush Limbaugh? I must say that I never heard him speak live, but I knew who he was and how he had influenced many people. For me, he was a sort of a distant bogeyman, and I am reasonably sure I would disagree with maybe 99% of the things he was saying. But does that mean he was evil? Difficult to say, unless you happened to meet his cook. 

From what comes out of a debate he had with Peter Gleick (a climate scientist), Limbaugh doesn't come out as evil, more like the typical climate science denier.  Not a person who consciously lies, just a person who lacks the intellectual tools needed to think quantitatively. That is, your next-door neighbor. 

Roy Spencer (another climate scientist, but of the heretical kind) tells us many good things about Rush Limbaugh. One stands out:

Rush was the same person, on the air and off the air.

And so, it seems that Limbaugh, like many people whom we often consider evil, didn't see himself as evil. He would just wear his mask in the scene and at home, just like most of us do. In the end, the persona, the mask, is the same thing as our real face. 

As Seneca said, what counts in the play is how well it is acted and we cannot say that Rush Limbaugh didn't play his part well. Perhaps there will come a day when we won't need to label others as evil to think of us as good. Then, we'll be able to consider our enemies as human beings, just like us. Rest in peace, Rush.

Fossil fuels: are we on the edge of the Seneca cliff?

Originally published on "Cassandra's Legacy" on Sunday, December 7, 2014

"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, n. 91. 

This observation by Seneca seems to be valid for many modern cases, including the production of a nonrenewable resource such as crude oil. Are we on the edge of the "Seneca cliff?"

It is a well known tenet of people working in system dynamics that there exist plenty of cases of solutions worsening the problem. Often, people appear to be perfectly able to understand what the problem is, but, just as often, they tend to act on it in the wrong way. It is a concept also expressed as "pushing the lever in the wrong direction."

With fossil fuels, we all understand that we have a depletion problem, but the solution, so far, has been to drill more, to drill deeper, and to keep drilling. Squeezing out some fuel by all possible sources, no matter how difficult and expensive, could offset the decline of conventional fields and keep production growing for the past few years. But is it a real solution? That is, won't we pay the present growth with a faster decline in the future?

This question can be described in terms of the "Seneca Cliff", a concept that I proposed a few years ago to describe how the production of a non renewable resource may show a rapid decline after passing its production peak. A behavior that can be shown graphically as follows:

It is not just a theoretical model: there are several historical cases where the production of a resource collapsed after having reached a peak. For instance, here are the data for the Caspian sturgeon, a case that I termed "peak caviar".

Do we risk to see something like this in the case of the world production of oil and gas? In my opinion, yes. There are some similarities; both fossil fuels and caviar are non-replaceable resources; and in both cases prices went rapidly up at and after the peak. So, if Caspian sturgeon showed such a clear Seneca cliff, oil and gas could do the same. But let me go into some details.

In the first version of my Seneca model, the fast decline of production was interpreted in terms of growing pollution that places an extra burden on the productive system and reduces the amount of resources available for the development of new resources. However, I found that the Seneca behavior is rather robust in these systems and it appears every time people try to "stretch out" a system to force it to produce more and faster than it would naturally do.

So, in the case of the Caspian sturgeon, above, growing pollution is unlikely to be the cause of the rapid collapse of production (even though it may have contributed to the problem). Rather, the main factor in the collapse is likely to have been the effect of the growing prices of a rare and non replaceable resource (caviar). High prices enticed producers to invest more and more resources in raking out of the sea as much fish as possible. It worked, for a while, but, in the end, you can't fish sturgeon which isn't there. It ended up in disaster: a classic case of a Seneca Cliff.

Can this phenomenon be modeled? Yes. Below, I describe the model for this case in some detail. The essence of the idea is that producers need to reinvest a fraction of their profits in developing new resources in order to keep producing. However, the yield of the new investments declines as time goes by because the most profitable resources (e.g. oilfields) are exploited first. As a result, less and less capital is available for new investments. Eventually production reaches a maximum, then it declines. If we assume that companies re-invest a constant fraction of their profits in new resources, the model leads to the symmetric bell shaped curve known as the "Hubbert Curve."

However, as I describe in detail below, decline can be postponed if high prices provide extra capital for new productivedevelopments. Unfortunately, growth is obtained at the cost of a fast burning out of capital resources. The final result is not any more the symmetric Hubbert curve, but a classic Seneca curve: decline is more rapid than growth.

Is this what we are facing for fossil fuels? Of course, we are only dealing with qualitative models, but, on the other hand, qualitative models are often robust and give us an idea of what to expect, even though they can't tell us much in terms of predicting events on a precise time scale. The ongoing collapse of oil prices may be a symptom that we are running out of the capital resources necessary to keep developing new fields. So, what we can say is that there are some good chances of rough times ahead - actually very rough. The Seneca cliff may well be part of our near term future.


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The Seneca curve as the result of increasing fractions of profits allocated to the production of a non renewable resource

by Ugo Bardi - 07 Dec 2014


Note: this is not a formal scientific paper; it is more a rough "back of the envelope" calculation designed to show how increasing capex fractions can affect the production rate of a non renewable resource. If someone could give me a hand to make a more refined and publishable study, I would be happy to collaborate!


The basics of a system dynamics model describing the exploitation of a non renewable resource in a free market are described in detail in a 2009 paper byBardi and Lavacchi. According to the model developed in that paper, it is assumed that the non renewable resource (R) exists in the form of an initial stock of fixed extent. The resource stock is gradually transformed into a stock of capital (C) which in turn gradually declines. The behavior of the two stocks as a function of time is described by two coupled differential equations.

R' = - k1*C*R
C' = k2*C*R - k3*C,

where R' and C' indicate the flow of the stocks as a function of time (R' is what we call "production"), while the "ks" are constants. This is a "bare bones" model which nevertheless can reproduce the "bell shaped" Hubbert curve and fit some historical cases. Adding a third stock (pollution) to the system, generates the "Seneca Curve", that is a skewed forward production curve, with decline faster than growth. 

The two stock system (i.e. without taking pollution into account) can also produce a Seneca curve if the equations above are slightly modified. In particular, we can write: 

R' = - k1*k3*C*R
C' = ko*k2*C*R - (k3+k4)*C.

Here, "k3" explicitly indicates the fraction of capital reinvested in production, while k4 which is proportional to capital depreciation (or any other non productive use). Then, we assume that production is proportional to the amount of capital invested, that is to k3*C. Note how the ratio of R' to the flow of capital into resource creation describes the net energy production (EROI), which turns out to be equal to k1*R. Note also that "ko" is a factor that defines the efficiency of the transformation of resources into capital; it can be seen as related to technological efficiency. These points will not be examined in detail here.

Here is the model as implemented using the Vensim (TM) software for system dynamics. The "ks" have been given explicit names. I am also using the convention of "mind sized models" with higher free energy stocks appearing above lower free energy stocks

If the k's are kept constant over the production cycle, the shape of the curves generated by this model is exactly the same as with the simplified version, that isa symmetric, bell shaped production curve. Here are the results of a typical run:

Things change if we allow "k3" to vary over the simulation cycle. The characteristic that makes "k3" (productive investment fraction) somewhat different than the other parameters of the model, is that it is wholly dependent on human choice. That is, while the other ks are constrained by physical and technological factors, the fraction of the available capital re-invested into production can be chosen almost at will (of course, there remains the limit of the total amount of available capital!). 

Higher prices will lead to higher profits for producers and to the tendency to increase the fraction reinvested in new developments. It is also known that in the region near the production peak prices tend to be higher - as in the historical cases of whale oil and caviar and whale oil. In the case of caviar, the price rise was nearly exponential, in the case of whale oil, more like a logistic curve. Assuming that the fraction of reinvested capital varies in proportion to prices, some modeling may be attempted. Let me show here the results obtained for an exponential increase of the fraction of reinvested Capex.
  

I have also tried other functions for the rising trend of k3. The results are qualitatively the same for a linear increase and for a logistic one: the Seneca behavior appears to be robust, as long as we assume a significant increase of the fraction of the reinvested capex. 

Let me stress once more that these are not supposed to be complete results. These are just tests performed with arbitrary assumptions for the constants. Nevertheless, these calculations show that the Seneca cliff is a general behavior that occurs when producers stretch out their system allocating increasing fractions of capital to production.