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Energy, population, reproduction, and rational thought
Last month, on ソラバドのほん: Life in the Convergence Zone:

I have some relevant thoughts of my own in relation to this article about the role of energy, population - in particular, control over reproduction - and the spread of rational thought which this margin is too small to contain, but which I will attempt to describe after my biology midterm.

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We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality ... what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America’s case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, here.

Part I: Political Power and Energy

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Chairman Mao Tse-tung, in "Problems of War and Strategy," November 6, 1938. Everybody knows the quote, because it's true, or true enough for the snappy pull-quote it is. But what does political power - or, perhaps more generally, government power - mean in a context of energy?

First, why do governments succeed in controlling subject populations? The obvious answer: governments aggregate power in ways beyond the capability of individual actors. The same number of people, organised, can exert more force than that number of people disorganised. In this way, a small number of humans can control the behaviour of larger numbers.

Are there bounds to this function? I assert that there are. I suggest further that these bounds are functions of projectable energy, which is to say, artificial force. At very low total energy availability levels, the ability to project force is sharply limited. Mobility is extremely energy-intensive; stone weapons are crude and low-order power multipliers.

But as energy capacity increases, power - and the technologies power made available - grow. The multipliers of force became greater. As these increase, the possible extents of empires grow, and the possible degree of control of a government over its population - of any size - grow, parallel rising curves that industrial-age thinkers of all sorts saw culminating in the global super-state. This power, ever more concentrated with ever-larger multipliers and ever-larger orders of multipliers, collected and directed by a common point of control, would overcome all opposition - eventually. It was, so the theory went, the inevitable march of history.

Many have speculated as to why this vision collapsed. (Some debate whether it has. I do not consider these arguments here.) Much of this speculation, particularly in the context of socialist states, focuses on the idea of management failure - overwhelming complexity defeating the ability of any organisation to control it effectively. I agree that certainly didn't help, but I suspect this to be more of a symptom rather than an underlying cause.

The super-government vision depends, amoungst other conditions, on the capability of the government to effectively aggregate the vast majority of the total power available. Through much of the industrial age, this paradigm held. Sources of energy - and, therefore, the products made possible by that energy - were typically large and immobile. This is in large part because energy density was not particularly high, and because the tools needed to liberate that energy were not particularly efficient.

Similarly, the vision depends upon the government having the power to aggregate power from additional subjects at a rate which allows it to control that increased population. If an individual can generate a given amount of power X, and it takes some fraction of that X to control that individual, the government has to be able to gain that fraction of power from the labours of that person, directly or indirectly. If the government can gain more than that percentage, it can use that additional power to control yet more people, or deepen its control over that individual.

It appears evident that for much of written history, these two conditions have been attainable. Not always, and not indefinitely, but certainly possible on a regular enough basis that the history of the globe is replete with imperial ambitions successfully realised. And, for that matter, of collectivist governments successfully holding power for long periods of time.

But what happens when the total available power in a civilisation (or Culture, if you prefer) exceeds the ability of the government to collect it that effectively?

In a high-ambient-energy culture, I suggest that effective government action becomes much more difficult not because of some mysterious breakdown of governmental ability, but because there's enough power - energy, communication, basic tools of self-organisation - floating around that individuals do not have to go along to have access to tools. They can go off on their own, or in their own small groups, more easily. They can have their own power multipliers. And if that energy is high density - or not particularly high density but can be converted very efficiently - then that amount which can be carried around rises above a particular effective threshold, and enables a single person to exert meaningful force.

What happens when any individual has access to enough personally-controllable power to create a genuinely disruptive level of change, if they work hard enough at it, and talk a few friends into helping out? Helping out with, say, a private suborbital launch vehicle, as a positive example of change? Or, as in Iraq, a shoulder-mounted RPG or a truck bomb? Or, as in the United States, four airliners filled with jet fuel?

In the short term, the potential for violence climbs dramatically. Grievances will be addressed, one way or another - as is happening in the aforementioned Iraq right now. But assuming - as I do - that eventually people (and governments) come to term with this reality, what do you get?

• One possible result is that associations become a whole lot more voluntary. Controlling disgruntled members of a collective entity becomes more difficult. One could argue that we're seeing this in the form of chosen communities over geographic communities.
  
• Another possible result could be that governmental entities become smaller, to try to move back into a functional power-collection point of the curve. Here, we see the end of the industrial-age aggregate states of Europe, and possibly even the United Kingdom, if current political trends actually play out. Many historians say that if the Civil War in the United States had been fought 20 years earlier, the South would have won, on the bases of projectable power; I would go so far to suggest that if the Civil War in the United States were to be fought today, the South would also win, because of the changes in the way that the distribution of energy affects the ability of a group to successfully control a subject population.
  
• A third is that governments become dramatically more aggressive at power aggregation by dropping the power and technology available throughout their society. This is possible - c.f. the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - but at great cost.

Obviously, since I'm calling out examples, I think this has been happening for thirty or so years, but that many people in positions of old-form power - I'm looking at you, neoconservative movement - have continued to fail - utterly - to grasp its significance.

This is one of the many reasons I care very much about issues such as future energy supplies. I want and prefer a high-energy, and hence high-entropy, and hence more voluntary society. The downhill slope of the oil curve will not be a pretty place to be without serious alternatives. The sooner we find these, the better.

To be continued