The future was yesterday…

Each New Year, media worldwide are rife with pundits of all kinds pretending to tell us what the year ahead and the years beyond are going to be… This year, I have already been bombarded with over 20 emails, newsletters, articles about what’s 2025 is going to be… and beyond. It’s all bull, mostly not even entertaining, on a par with Roman augurs of old pondering over the entrails of chicken or observing the fight paths of birds… You all probably have a similar experience.

Most of these future diviners run on autopilot. None seem to have realised what our dear friend Jean Baudrillard used to quip: “the future was yesterday”… Back then, in the early 2000s, he was already spot on. Now, even more so.

The global polycrisis that so many fear for the future has already engulfed the GIW. It is but the set of interrelated consequences of dynamics that have been unfolding since the early years of the first Industrial Revolution. In the recent past these dynamics have pushed the globalised industrial world (GIW) past a radical discontinuity. Most of humankind has already been dragged into it (only a few remnants of hunter-gatherer and subsistence agriculture people may escape it). This is now in the past. This means that a change of paradigm is now necessary. Concerning how every single decision we have to make about the future ahead of us, it has become vital to take the measure of this discontinuity.[1]

After decades of work by pioneers, this matter has now reached “mainstream” so to speak. For example, the UK Royal Society (the world oldest such society to which the likes of Newton, Darwin, etc., belonged), on 1 January 2024, published a milestone issue entitled: Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis.[2] It included some 19 papers that gathered thousands of references.

What’s the relevance of that to us decision-makers in business, finance or government?

Overall, this substantial pile of work stretching since the 1970s makes it clear that the discontinuity the globalised industrial world (GIW) has entered into marks a drastic evolutionary break: the life and death challenge, for the whole of humankind, is to evolve very abruptly in technological/psycho-social (aka cultural) terms over a few decades. One ignores this kind of findings at one’s peril.

In fact, some of the researchers very much doubt that humankind may be able to meet this challenge.[3] Some of them put it bluntly: “Humans have evolved culturally and perhaps genetically to be unsustainable.”[4] We must also note, the work of Nebel et al., who used 50 years of historical data to recalibrate the World3 model of Meadows fame.[5] Their work corroborates that we have indeed entered a discontinuity. Among other matters, they conclude: “It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society”; exactly the same conclusion that we have arrived at.

Meanwhile, an international team of 65 researchers has demonstrated that close to 90% of Earth-System boundaries have already been breached; yet another corroboration that we have entered into a lethal discontinuity.[6]

In brief, the whole GIW is now locked in a “dead man walking” state, i.e., locked on death row, with presently no way out. Humankind has been through discontinuities and bottlenecks in the past. This one is unprecedented: let’s recap in summary fashion so we can be clear. The GIW is simultaneously at the end of:

• 300 years of industrial development;
• 10,000 years of agricultural development;
• 3 million years since becoming the 1st technological life form on Earth and beginning the development of the human psyche, i.e., how people think, make decisions and organise themselves socially; now, the wide range of theisms that emerged some 3000 years ago, and more specifically the economics theism developed about 300 years ago, have brought the GIW to the brink and preclude passing beyond Dead State;
• 2.4 billion years of evolution since Life on Earth evolved a new life form that was highly toxic to the whole of Life on the Planet as it was back then (i.e., the first photo-synthesisers that created the atmosphere we now breathe) — the emergence of photosynthesis changed the course of Life, however, this time round the highly toxic GIW is controlling only about 19TW of installed power, fossil fuels based (and in the process of losing that) versus Earth-Life mustering in the order of 2236TW: humankind has no other option but change rapidly and find a viable, non-predatory ecological niche…

The above is akin to Jean’s ”the future was yesterday”… This is what the entire domain of decision-making now has to take as the starting point.

An added matter is that nearly 100% of decision-makers are not conscious of the basic features of the world they live in and not conscious of the above. To quote a very dear colleague: “Reality is constructed as an ongoing process of negotiation between perception and beliefs about that perception. Hence, it exists on a spectrum for each person at any moment. At times, or for some, reality can constitute an overwhelming exposure to perceptual data (overwhelming any contribution from a system of beliefs), and on the other hand at times, or for some, it can constitute a pure hallucination of existing beliefs unmodified to any extent by actual data, perceptual or otherwise, with the added feature that the more rigid the belief system, the less modifiable that hallucinatory ‘reality’ becomes for that person who is then living in a state of permanent delusion.” Nearly 100% of decision-makers, believing in economics in full contradiction with thermodynamics, systems dynamics, the ecology of the whole of life on earth, and anhropology, most of the time hallucinate what they take as being reality.

Of course, when faced with something that falls outside of their comfort zone and beliefs, most often people tend to push back, deny, and/or run some scenario in their mind that distorts what they are faced with in order to forcibly make it fit within their comfort zone. In doing so, they apparently get rid of the disturbance (for a while). Until recently, while enough net energy was sloshing through the GIW, this kind of delusion did not matter too much (bar world wars, depressions, recessions, etc.). In the present instance, this kind of response to what is unfolding is clearly ill advised. And yet, we observe present decision-makers engaging stubbornly into heuristics (aka painful trial and error processes), forever agitating and pursuing fantasies while grappling with a polycrisis they have no means of understanding and dealing with effectively.

In summary, the present situation requires new ways of thinking and new methods. To develop them, one must be sufficiently familiar with the fundamentals of thermodynamics, systems dynamics, the ecology of Life on Earth, and anthropology, plus, or course key aspect of engineering. This is what we have been doing since our world entered the future many years ago…

To lean more about our anticiaption, foresight, and Strategic Transfomative Scenario Planning work (STSP) please contact: info@coolplanet-foundation.org

Cool Planet Foundation (Stichting) is a not-for-profit member of the Fourth Transition Initiative catalysed by Fourth Transition Ltd.

[1] Beside our own Fourth Transition Initiative work, we can refer here to the lifetime works of people like Professors William Rees, Ruben Nelson, Jem Bendell, Bruno Latour, Tim Lenton, Will Steffen, Jean Baudrillard, Serge Latouche, and many others.

[2] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 379, No 1893, compiled and edited by Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Timothy M. Waring and Vanessa P. Weinberger.

[3] E.g., Waring TM, Wood ZT, Szathmáry E., 2023, Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 379: 20220259.

[4] Richerson PJ, Boyd RT, Efferson C., 2023, Agentic processes in cultural evolution: relevance to Anthropocene sustainability. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 379: 20220252.

[5] Arjuna Nebel, Alexander Kling, Ruben Willamowski, Tim Schell, 2023, Recalibration of limits to growth, An update of the World3 model, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 1–13, DOI: 10.1111/jiec.13442.

[6] Joyeeta Gupta et al., 2024, A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations, www.thelancet.com/planetary-health, 11 September, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(24)00042-1.