Nate Hagens

Organized high trust coordinated systems like democracy and civil discipline require energy and effort and social engagement to maintain, just like slowing down the aging of a young lake system.

Degraded low trust coercive systems are

In a thermodynamic sense, the lower energy state, they're what systems roll towards when you stop putting energy and collective effort towards them.

The default societal valley, the place that gravity pulls us when we stop climbing.

This brings me to the practical point of this episode, ahead of when we start building composite worlds.

The futures that are easiest to reach from the valley we currently inhabit

are not necessarily the futures most worth living in.

In contrast, the futures most desirable and worth living in will require some hard climbing.

Let me stress that again, though to many of the viewers of this channel, it will appear obvious.

The easiest futures ahead of us are not the most desirable.

And the most desirable futures for humanity and the biosphere will require sustained effort to reach and sustained effort to remain in.

And if we stop climbing, gravity, the social and ecological, will pull us back down into a valley we don't want.

An important caveat too is the landscape we are navigating is not static.

It's pretty dynamic and always changing, whether through human or non-human forces.

And as we move through the peaks and valleys of the terrain, the ground beneath us continues to shift under our feet.

Energy descent, climate change, biodiversity loss.

and much more are all actively reshaping the valley as we proceed through it.

In other words, a future that was uphill in the 1990s may now be downhill or will be in a decade from now or vice versa.

So, I'd like to think about this in terms of what we covered in part two.

Contraction, economic contraction, combined with adversarial geopolitics and increased concentration of power is now the path of least resistance, or at least economic contraction for most people.