My quest is to understand mine and others predicament of being aware that we are a member of a species that is bent on global ecocide. Politically I am a citizen of the particularly wealthy nation of Australia that exhibits the "leading" worst traits of developed nations.  In the intuitive search for guidance, and choosing to selected strengthen particular nueral synapses, today, I go back to revisit the book "Plato's Revenge : Politics in the Age of Ecology" authored by William Ophuls, that seeks to strike at the political and philosophical ideas at the heart of the matter.

I am going to ramble on a bit, because I don't have a directed simple conscious goal, except to highlight  anologies that describe my limited ideas of what is happening in the world now.

I reccomend reading the elaboration of ideas in the whole book, although I don't now recall specific content. I do know that Ophuls gives a good blast on the growth of widespread corruption of and lack of virtue in our businesses and government. Ophuls clearly states his principles in the direct sentences of his short preface.

"The root of the disease is not defective public policies but a defective public philosophy."  This I adopted in the title of this article.

"The modern political paradigm was bound for self-destruction even before the emergence of ecological scarcity".

"Any polity that abandons virtue and rejects community necessarily becomes the author of its own demise".

William Ophuls states that "the economic and technocratic juggernaut driving us toward an increasingly chaotic and dismal future is but the physical manifestation of Hobbe's mosly unacknowledged philosophy".  Hobbe's idea have become the template for modern life, which is seemingly determined by technique and finance.

The phrase "nasty, brutish and short" comes to mind in association with Hobbes, and also the idea of a "social contract". It was also a time of failure of government, during the English Civil Wars. Hobbes introduced the idea of a "Common-wealth". It of course addressed the political problems of his times, through the concepts and understandings of his times, and I think I am going to have to try and read it, if is as central as Ophuls says it is. My school education and familiarity on the written Philosophy foundations of our culture has been very deficient.

Of course we are more than ideas, because verbalized ideas are limited output descriptions of our instinctive brain operating systems, the various sub-specialized modules of our two different hemispheres, ruled as it is by intricate and subtle connectivity, balance, rhythm and control, and the order of a hundred or so differently active nuero-transmitter chemicals, and specialized receptors, giving us abilities as a symbolic language enabled, socially inclined, learning organism. We are hardly a machine, as machines are tools that we build according to collective science and understanding, for a defined purpose. We are part of mysterious evolving super system of nature, which has no purpose as we understand it as individuals, but grants us a temporary lived existance in this evolving spatial and temporal spread of a universal adaptive creativity and beauty, should we choose to see it that way.

Hobbes also had rather strong materialistic view of human nature, but was not so blessed with current knowledge of our ecological complexity and strong ties to our evolving biosphere, nor had any idea of the future damage of industrial, technological, fossil fueled growth civilization has brought.

We are time bound creatures, and input bandwidth limited, and can only consider a few related items in our short-term working memory. Also taking in new information that creates a cognitive dissonance with what we already think we know is difficult. This is an absolute limitation, that can only be overcome by serious self-directed training. We spend most of our time honing and rehearsing what we already know, based on current perception. It is the reason for our years of child-rearing, and the years of education and practice necessary for vocational specialization and talents, that continue far into adulthood.

When we get information about our changing climate, the difficulties inherent in changing the way our society "works", gets its requirements for living from nature, and becomes our "wealth", make for a strong cognitive dissonance. The way we provide for our biological essentials for living and security right now are strongly incompatible with action on climate change. So although we can acknowledge the "Science" and understand the simple physics  of how it works, incorporating the idea into our lives, in order to change our lives, is very difficult, gradual business, that has to involve the practical things of "technique and finance".

If we want most of the society to become involved in the change process, then we have had now two generations of people who have grown up with the availability of knowledge of living in this age of growing ecological scarcity, and we ought to be actively promoting the pathways to changing ourselves.

It is very important to identify the vested interests who are actively opposing the process of changing our ideas to match the facts.

When we get down to "brass tacks" about ideas, they are only simple threads in a vast changing tapastry. We concentrate of simple ideas because they help us see important patterns of the whole. Individuals are fictionally important threads, about which the ongoing "pattern" is weaved, in the "Wheel of Time" mammoth series of Science Fiction Novels, author's pen name Robert Jordan, but its the ideas that control us. We get to try to predict peoples behaviour, particularly politicians, by identifying the main ideas which they attempt to show that they subscribe to. As these get presented as an unsually limited and simplified set, they are "iconic".  They stand in for a whole range of other concepts and growing mental baggage and "cargo".

Its the confusion about the unexpressed mental baggage and cargo of political parties, and the expectation of "ulterior motives" that produces a both lack of trust in politicians and their party politices, and a kind of non-surprise when things turn out be dirtier, nastier and more corrupt than we expect.

Likewise, the simple actions of going about our daily work, chores, and biological routines and rhythms, have a widespread baggage of chains of ecological consequences, that really do need to be thought about, to change ourselves. We should not be surprised when failure to do the necessary thinking and organisational change, leads to lasting, perverse, and harmful consequences.

The current political clampdown on ecological activism by vested interests that are responsible for the long term ecological harm, and are opposing change, has to be overcome, by turning up the intensity and scope of ecological activism. There is no other societal choice.

Ideas are simple pattern elements which are capable of our simple understanding, with a viral existance which have wide-spread unacknowledged influence. To the degree we acknowledge them by action, rather than thinking, ideas are the rationalized accord with the instinctive individual and social "drives" granted to us as survival mechanisms by evolution. They have no rightness or wrongness in themselves, and it is their place in our overall perception that matters, and how they accord with our our individual and ecological roles, by the weightings of our feelings and values.

When we do reflect on the "idea" that is manifestation of our instinct, the process "is inevitably dialectical : when ideas are given concrete form, that form then affects our way of thinking. . . . We shape our instiutions, and afterwards our institutions shape us." If we want to reshape ourselves, we have to reshape our institutions.

GDP by a non-coincidence also stands for the Gross Domestic Product, which is about all things monetary.  Growth in this is still the political catch-cry of the LNP - for "Jobs and Prosperity".  There is nothing wrong with Jobs or Prosperity.  They just have to be in harmony with the larger concepts of ecological scarcity and the management of ourselves in respect to it.   A better philosophy has to have the concept of "Ecological Harmony".

Ecological Harmony has to ditch the baggage of unending growth, consumption and waste. Which political parties even dare to mention this simple two word concept in their iconic three word action slogans? Failure of acknowledgment of this ballooning Elephant in Room, its the only real form of "growth" these days, must add signficant distrust to our judgement of politicians, and also to our own un-acknowledged motives.

Ecological Harmony is a difficult grappling with the reality of what we are, where we live, and what the future will be, and an attempt to understand the true consequences of our actions as part of whole, still maintaing our self-interest but with as much humility as we can learn. It should not be seen as a new age slogan, but as a necessary and uncertain survival task for all life as a whole. It means recognition that the easy fossil-fueled technological lifestyles of developed nations are ending. It is the larger meaning of "Living beyond our means", and should be thoroughly explicated as such, along side the adoption of better plans to "Live within our ecological means".

Ecological Harmony doesn't mean static balance, it means continual dynamic striving and adjustment , homeostatis, renewal, recognition and acceptance within nature's set limits, and determination to step back when we have gone beyond its safe boundaries. Its an arms limitation agreement in our current war on nature. We have to recognize the rights to the ecological striving of all other living creatures. It evolves through time as evolutionary harmony. We continue together, with a low background extinction rate, or we divided and destroyed, we all fall together.

Our whole legal system and self-governance needs to be revised to address our new predicaments, and not just the self-interest of those who now benefit the most from our institutions. This world isn't here for our benefit. We are an accident of evolution. Our science and biological technology is primitive compared to the size and complexity of earths biosphere systems. As Naomi Klein has stressed - "we are not the masters here". We are much more like the sorcerers apprentice, unable to stop what we have started. Nature is the all encompassing sovereign, not some human-appointed king or parliament. Hobbes was aware of that. We don't seem to be in our politics. We are doing badly in the Social contract, and doing catastrophe in the Nature contract. Are we defective or is it just our philosophy?

Of course we are limited beings. It is even worse having a defective philosophy, or none at all. At least this has the potential of remedy.

Speaking of the moral decline of our governments and businesses, and the social contract, I wonder what Hobbs would think of the recent Panama Papers Scandal, and the role of his future government.

"The British government’s claim to be tackling tax avoidance is about as credible as Al Capone claiming to be leading the fight against organized crime. In fact, Britain is at the heart of the global tax haven network, and continues to lead the fight against its regulation."

" For whilst corruption exists in every country, what enables that corruption to flourish and become institutionalized is the network of secretive financial regimes that allow the world’s biggest criminals and fraudsters to escape taxation, regulation and oversight of their activities. And this network is a conscious creation of the British state."

One wonders about politicians who promote finanical services as a desirable future major industry.

Britain is the heart and soul of global tax evasion

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/08/britain-is-the-heart-and-soul-of-global-tax-evasion/

William Ophuls - Latest book is Sane Polity : A Pattern Language, which I haven't read.

William Ophuls - Planning vs Design

William Ophuls - Latest book is Sane Polity : A Pattern Language, which I haven't yet read, but is has something to do with this short extract.

http://www.greatchange.org/othervoices.html

William Ophuls - Ecological Scarcity

http://www.greatchange.org/ophuls,ecological_scarcity.html