I just read the book Work, by James Suzman. It’s an ambitious historical, biological and philosophical (with some dabbling in thermodynamics) study of how our attitudes about work evolved, starting with the animal kingdom (ants are well known for hard work, but I bet you didn’t know about the masked weaver, whose addiction to hard work borders on the absurd), through our hunter-gatherer ancestors (who hardly worked but were happy), then through agriculturalist (worked hard but were mostly miserable) and urban ones (worked to keep up with the Joneses and were prone to the malady of infinite aspirations, but also found much of their life meaning through work). Most people have strong beliefs about work. From liberals like the Lebanese mystic Khalil Gibran, who coined the phrase “Work is love made manifest”, to conservative Horatio Algers’ stories about young men who work hard to achieve social success, to the Nazi greeting emblazoned on the gates of Auschwitz:”Work will set you free”. One thing Suzman did not talk about is how work (not just the monetary rewards of work) can act as a feedback between actions and environmental impacts.

If our environment is abundant and competition with other individuals, families, tribes, villages, or nations is minimal, then we can spend our time on edifying civilizing pursuits such as the arts, sciences, literature, and recreational activities that involve sports, crafts, nature appreciation or travel. Times of plenty select for liberals, and their idea of work as edifying, and expressive of love and creativity. The problem with this is when people become wasteful of finite (or slowly-renewable) resources and are unable to see or act on feedbacks from their environment that resources are either getting scarcer and need to be conserved, or that they are poisoning themselves (and/or other synergistic species) in the future, or others far away in the present, with their extravagant resource use. Feedbacks in the form of understanding that we need to change, and moralistic urgings are just too weak to make a difference. First world liberals may preach about recycling and reduced consumption, but preaching is weak feedback, and they continue to consume much more (slowly-renewable and/or polluting) resources per capita than the third world, with their driving, flying, climate-controlled houses, globally transported food-on-demand to local supermarkets and restaurants, and children ravenous for Temu, Amazon, and Tik-Tok products, who must be pacified not just with consumer products but with anti-depressants. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning these folks, we are all doing our best under weak-feedback circumstances. I am not trying to deny anyone the few comforts they have in an otherwise harsh life or condemn them morally for hypocrisy. I only want to highlight that we all need stronger feedbacks than morality or abstract understanding or preaching.

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As resources get scarcer and poisons more obvious, there is more of a selection for conservatives and moderate liberals (I am always using these terms to denote personality characteristics, not political values) who at least have the feedback of hard work, which limits consumption somewhat. If one is not just given resources, but has to work hard for them, one consumes less, and appreciates what one has more, treating one’s possessions with more respect than throwing them in the garbage or hoarding them in favor of novel products.

However, this work-related feedback is not that strong either, because one can still consume more than the environment can provide in the long term. One can work hard and still cause destruction and resource depletion somewhere else, and/or in the future, because work (especially when the rewards are money and social status, and the costs are only time and tired muscles or brain) is not a strong enough feedback for one’s actions’ impacts on one’s resources. Most humans need something more immediate and conclusive (aka less noisy in engineering terms) as far as feedbacks are concerned. The more time and space and intermediate actions due to others between action and consequence, the more slow and noisy the feedbacks. The weak feedback of work, and the slow and noisy feedbacks of unpleasant though mostly in other places natural phenomena allow conservatives to think that anthropogenic climate change is a liberal conspiracy. This is also encouraged by watching liberals who supposedly understand the abstract idea of anthropogenic climate change but seem to still indulge in consumptive behavior, with only symbolic virtue signaling actions like buying Priuses or Teslas instead of Hummers. It’s also true that even if one gets clear feedback (here and now, to oneself and family) that one is hurting one’s environment, if one can move away to a better environment, that feedback may not help change one’s actions. So it’s not like our hunter-gatherer ancestors or the amish (who at least where I lived in Missouri tended to move to other places once they depleted their soil of nutrients) necessarily had it better when it came to feedbacks and can provide a model for us.

What we first need are ways to provide a strong feedback system, so that people don’t have to rely on abstract ideas (most people are not motivated by such), moralistic nudges (which most will always try to get around and game), or just hard work to produce money. Re-creating more local economies should help achieve stronger feedbacks, but we must secondly figure out how to keep people who have fouled their own nest from easily moving somewhere else to continue their destructive behavior. Once we implement local economies, perhaps some kind of AI-managed data system to track people’s effect on their local (both human and non-human) environments could be used by people in villages and watersheds to decide on who is allowed to immigrate from somewhere else into their local economy, besides their ability to contribute and their need of local goods and services. Of course the AI would need to have some human management, and that would need to come from higher levels of organization than villages and watersheds (levels that involve other villages and watersheds), and if not careful in how that is designed, we could end up with a totalitarian system. We don’t want to recreate either the current bureaucratic dysfunctions of big organizations or the laissez-faire dysfunctions of global markets. Having the nested organizational network topology that we have called “third attractor” in previous posts might be a step in the right direction.

We need the kind of love that is not just manifested through work, but the kind of work that also binds us (through both cooperation and friendly competition) tightly to each other and our non-human earthly family/village members (aka environment), and therefore shows us consequences quickly and unambiguously. And also, though there is a tradeoff with the previous requirement, a love that allows us enough individual freedom to be creative.