"What wins in the short term forces everybody to race towards that thing even if everyone racing towards that thing makes an entire system self-terminate in the long term and that's what we call the multi-polar trap. "

I. The Trap

The Cage of Economic Ethics

Daniel: So the Superorganism is like if you take this multipolar trap that has all of these different actors in a race with each other—you would say that's a property of the Superorganism. Now we're dropping down a layer to say that property of the Superorganism is what makes it to where all these players don't feel like they actually have the capability of doing the ethical thing, because they will just be kind of priced out, and…

Nate: Even if they're ethical individual humans. Their position within the economic hierarchy doesn't allow them to express their ethical view.

When Dominance Defeats the Good

Daniel: Yeah. In general, I think we talked about this once—if we look at China's taking of Tibet, or colonialist taking of Native American territories via genocide in the founding of the US, it wasn't based on who the more ethical actor was. It wasn't based on which civilization should win in terms of some philosophical "true, good, and beautiful." It was based on effective dominance, which is a combination of violence and economic productive capacity.

And so, given that what ends up winning in a very Darwinian sense and what is good in an ethical or philosophic sense—or even in a long-term viability sense—aren't the same thing, that's at the core of something we have to address, right?

The Race Toward Self-Termination

Daniel: This is where you have a scenario where what wins in the short term forces everybody to race towards that thing, even if everyone racing towards that thing makes the entire system self-terminate in the long term.

And that's what we call the multipolar trap. It's expressed in the tragedy of the commons, the military arms race, the market race to the bottom. You could define it as a property of the Superorganism to exploit all the energy in its environment and then hit a cliff.

The Cancer Cell's Victory

Daniel: We know that typically you have the peak number of cancer cells in a person's body right before they die. And then all the cancer cells die when they kill the host.

So the cancer cells individually are utilizing metabolic resource faster than the other cells and reproducing faster than the other cells—so it seems like they're winning at a very short-term game. But they are actually killing the host that they depend upon.

Lots of people have drawn the analogy that human presence on the biosphere looks a lot like a cancer, where it is maximizing its extraction from that which it depends upon in a way that is actually breaking the substrate it depends upon.

II. Why the Usual Escapes Don't Work

Can the Cancer Become Self-Aware?

Nate: So is the purpose of this conversation to educate and influence cancer cells to become self-aware, to change their behaviors?

Daniel: Well, I think one of the things we're also talking about that's tricky is where it seems like the cancer cell behavior is actually following rational self-interest defined by the game theoretics of: if I stop being a cancer cell, the body's still gonna die. Right? Because I can't stop everybody else from doing it.

And so unless I can stop a certain critical mass from doing it—and this gets down to—if we don't cut the trees down, but we don't have some rule of law that makes sure nobody does, then all it means is the other tribe that's in competition with us cuts all the trees down, and we still don't get to protect the forest.

They'll use that economic advantage against us in the next tribal warfare, and we're screwed. So not only are we gonna cut the trees down faster than we need, we're gonna race to cut them down faster than the other guy because we can't get everyone to agree not to.

The Paralysis of Individual Agency

Nate: Which is why, at least at first hearing about the ecological, biophysical narrative of the Superorganism—and you're gonna tell me where yours fits in here—at least at first it feels to someone that they don't have any agency, because what does one person's change do to this larger dynamic that you're describing?

We've Done This Before (But Not Really)

Daniel: So if we take an example—if we try to get hopeful and we say, "But let's look at where we did change really bad things because some small number of one persons really did stand up for something." They got other one persons to stand up. They got a critical mass, and we shifted it.

Let's take a couple examples that are often given: cigarettes, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving and seat belts, or CFCs and ozone. We could give plenty of examples. It's true that we don't have a history where we've never solved anything that matters, ecologically or socially. There are some times where people, out of concern for the commons, went against some profit stream and actually won a thing.

But they are different in kind than what we're facing now. And I wanna point out where they're different in kind.

Nate: And different in scale, but go on.

Why Climate Is Categorically Different

Daniel: They're different in scale and different in kind in a way that's connected.

If we look at cigarettes—"four out of five doctors choose Camel cigarettes"—we obviously haven't gotten rid of cigarettes, but we've made it to where you have to be 18 to buy them and they have to have a surgeon general's warning that this will kill you before you use it. We've definitely decreased the total number of people that use cigarettes, and they can't use them in buildings and such.

That took a lot of work. A lot of people died of lung cancer and second-hand lung cancer first, for a vested interest profit stream that knew it was wrong from well before it was regulated.

But the sale of tobacco, as big a deal as it was—it was not the engine of creation for the economy as a whole. It was one sector of the economy. It was one product.

Energy: The Substrate Itself

Daniel: When we're talking about climate change, as you focus on, there are no industries that don't need energy. There is no such thing as even the possibility of any good or service that doesn't need energy.

So when we're trying to deal with something that is the byproduct of using energy itself, it is connected to the machine of creation rather than one little area. It's like CFCs—not every single industry was based on aerosol propellants. You were able to change that without having to change macroeconomics. You really only had to change an industry, and so you could get enough force to do it.

When you're trying to change something that is at the heart of macroeconomics itself, the vested interests against it is everything.

Power Protecting Itself

Daniel: And it's not only that every industry—and thus every single business—requires it. It's that also every nation state's geopolitical position requires it.

So literally power itself is bound to it. The entire machinery of power will resist anything that would decrease its relative power capacity. This is why, from backing out of the Kyoto Treaty to whatever—the whole history of the thing—why has it been so hard?

It's because the market can get us to organize based on incentive, but if incentive isn't adequate and we actually have to use an anti-incentive—we have to use a deterrent—the market doesn't really do deterrents well. So you have a state that does that, which is: you make it illegal. Someone will get arrested if they break the law, or their business will stop being able to operate.

III. What Would Need to Exist

The Nation-State Solution (And Its Boundaries)

Daniel: So this multipolar trap that we talk about, where there is some near-term incentive where if any agent does that they win in the short term and it creates a race for everybody to do that—we've figured out how to solve multipolar traps inside of a nation-state by rule of law, monopoly of force, and enforcement.

We can say, "No, we're not gonna cut down all the trees. We're gonna have a national park. We're gonna keep trees in the national park, and no logger is allowed to cut there." And what that means is a monopoly of violence will forcibly stop you if you're cutting there, and take you to jail to protect the rule of law.

Inside of a nation-state, we're able to prevent most multipolar traps. But we do not have international governance to deal with global ones. And so then we end up getting the various nation-states competing with each other.

The Paradox of Global Governance

Daniel: This is why there is a desire for something like global governance—because the global oceans, the global atmosphere, global biodiversity, the global commons that we depend upon can't have a situation where each country, if they make the right choice, gets disadvantaged, so that nobody makes the right choice.

The reason we don't want a one-world government is because: How do you have something that has that much power that doesn't become corrupt? And how do you ensure that there are checks and balances on it?

We do need something like effective global governance, which does not have to be a government. It can be a decentralized process. But it still has to allow us to solve the multipolar traps.