Transcript excerpt from Daniel Schmachtenberger's GITA talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvAbKE8-jYA&t=2679s https://youtu.be/P5a01xhMT9g follows:
I wrote a paper early on that talked about as long as the value of a tree is worth more dead than alive on people's balance sheets, or a whale is, we'll continue deforestation and whaling. And it's clear that the whale in the ocean is not on anybody's balance sheet and so leaving it doesn't economically benefit me in any way. If I leave it, it doesn't ensure someone else doesn't kill it, and if I do kill it, depending upon, it's five hundred thousand dollars worth of sellable whale meat.
That perverse incentive structure, because nature has no balance sheet, and sovereign beings are seen as resources and whatever, is, is genocidal, it just can't be called anything else. Like we have to be clear what the f$@k it is.
But if we wanted to say what is the real value of a tree or a whale? So if you think about the real value of a tree, the first big question becomes value to whom? To which beneficiary? Because as soon as we realize that it's not only the value to whoever gets to put the lumber on their economic balance sheet, but everybody that it is sequestering CO2 and producing oxygen for, but also all the animals that get to live in it, and all the migratory animals that are maintaining vast inter-ecosystem interactions that use that as a critical part of the inter-ecosystem interaction.
The value of it, you have to say to whom, first, and you find that there are so many beneficiaries and so many value types that are all non-fungible.
And when you realize that the tree, if I cut down all the trees in an area, now I get way worse floods, right, because they're not stabilizing the topsoil. That also washes all the topsoil away. I also get way worse droughts. I also get increased extreme weather events in the area independent of climate change.
So now this means all the people in the area end up moving from extreme weather events. Now I get resource conflicts. Now I get wars. Now I have to invest more in the military-industrial complex.
Do trees prevent wars? Totally.
Do trees prevent mass poverty and famine? Totally.
Do trees house the bats that keep the mosquitoes down that prevent the malaria overgrowth and do they also stabilize the topsoil that keeps the water clean for the fish that keep the mosquitoes down? Totally.
Do the trees stabilize the topsoil in a way that not only keeps the river healthy, but where the river dumps into the ocean, where you f$@k all the trees in an area and the coastal ecosystem dies as a result down river? What would it cost? Oh, no, it's fine, we cut down the trees, but we created a mechanical carbon sequestration, and we're sequestering as many tons of CO2! Shut the f$@k up! The tree doesn't just sequester CO2. It does a million things, right? So if I said what would it cost for me to maintain the soil microbiota, and the migratory pathways, and the coral with known technologies, the tree would cost a trillion dollars.
And I will destroy a trillion dollars of value to get a hundred dollars of lumber.
Because a trillion dollars of value is not on my balance sheet and the hundred dollars of lumber is.
When you realize it's not like we externalize a few costs, it's like the only thing we internalize is the cost to us. That's it. And everything else is f$@king, I have to be honest, it's all just stealing and raping. Right?
The default is we externalize all the costs. We just take the shit and don’t account for what it costs nature to make it or the waste we put back, or anything, or the wars that get created over it. We just take the shit. The only thing that we factor in is what it costs us to extract it. That's it. So we only internalize the marginal game theoretic utility to us. So externality is a bad concept. We should talk about that we internalize just game theory units and otherwise are just doing raping and pillaging; that would be honest; at technological scale, extincts everything.
You cannot measure all the things a tree does; you cannot; because we don't even understand what the soil microbiota really does; we're just starting to get a sense of it; we're discovering whole new phylums every… We thought the Human Genome Project was going to solve all of the health issues in the world because we didn't know when we were doing it that genetic modulation through an epigenome was a thing. We didn't know about the transcriptome or the proteome. So our stupid ass hubris has us think we know more than we do. We don't. We affect shit that is in the unknown set we can't measure. So when we do measure, and say I am paying attention to the thing that I can measure, I'm affecting a huge amount of shit that I can't measure either because it's fundamentally not quantifiable, it's only qualified, or because it's in the unknown set, and I don't know about it. So if I over optimize for what I can measure versus what I can't, then I'm going to destroy most of the world for what's in my little measurable window. That is irresponsible. That idea; that mindset; has to go. Yes measure some shit, but realize that you're measuring a trillionth of a percent of what you're affecting. And if you apply management theory, where you can only manage what you can measure, so we're going to manage against the measurement, you will be dangerous to the world. Wisdom is the delta between what measurement-based management theory tells you to do, and what the right thing to do is. That's how I would define wisdom. And that's the thing if you want to optimize for anything on, the return on, it's that. Because it’s the only thing that can safely steward the amount of technological power we have. So I don't want data driven anything; I want data informed; but there's so much sensible stuff that we can sense at some level, that we cannot quantify, that has to be factored.
When the Old Testament says in the top 10 things not to do, up there with murder and rape, is not have false idols. The measurement of reality and the modeling of reality is what it's talking about. The false idol is our model of reality, where we optimize for that, rather than reality. Where rather than be in direct sensory connection to reality, we look at reality through our model. Oh my model is I'm decreasing CO2! Look, there's no forest here, there's a stupid type of genetically engineered grass that sequesters a bunch of CO2 and killed everything that was here. Shut the f$@k up about the model that's being optimized! If you looked, if you felt that, you would know that thing was wrong. Right? And this is when Krishnamurti talks about, we have to have an immediate non-mediated relationship to reality, not mediated through measures or symbols or models, like actually sense it. If you actually sense, you'll notice that most of the people, in the name of progress, are all existentially angstful and depressed. And most indigenous people, if they haven't been totally genocided, are not. And that if someone in their wealthy life gets to have two weeks of vacation a year, they want to go camping. They want to basically be a shitty indigenous person. Like they want to be in trees without all of the phones and shit around and with close amounts of family, but they just destroyed that in the name of a progress that is insane.
So this is maybe the thing I want to share here the most is: no, I studied math; I studied sciences; I like math and sciences. But in math, Gödel’s theorem and then Tarski's theorem, and all the unknowability theorems, halting problems, etc., show us that if I have a set of logical truths that are consistent, they will never be complete. The whole set of measures I could ever have; the whole set of laws I could ever have; will be infinitely far away from the set that matters. So I want to take it as useful, but also infinitely wrong. So the thing that is sacred is unknowable, but I have to continue to sense into it and not live inside the model. Idol worship is that thing, right? That's what it is. It's why, when Lao Tsu could write anything, the first thing he wrote is: "everything else in this book is not it", right? The first line: “the Dao that is knowable is not the Eternal Dao”, why is that the first thing to write? Because everything else is: don't f$@kin’ pay too much attention to the words because you can't say the thing in words. Try to get a sense from the words to a feeling you have had right after someone you loved died, about what actually matters before you die. Try to get a sense of what is meaningful at all of how you felt when your baby was born, and you saw it, that you forget on a day-to-day basis. But in those moments I try to feel that and live where every one of your choices is optimizing for what you felt was important there, but for everybody.
There is no way to make a good enough model. We can't replace capitalism with better capitalism or better socialism or whatever. You can't make an AI that runs it. We have to have people that make choices independent of the measures and models. Meaning that they factor them, but also factor the limits and make the right choice anyways.
This is not systematizable. Systems are models. They are fundamental to everything wrong. It's human designed systems that have the known inside and optimized for, and all of the unknown outside and externalized.
So, who has the f$@king honesty and courage about the fact that they're going to die. They're not going to make it through this life alive and on their deathbed, most of the hours of their life will not be what they wish they had done more of and very few of the things they did will be what was really meaningful and that they will tell young people “I wish you would do this” And says, f$@k, I'm going to be loyal to that, more than anything else. I'm going to be loyal to that more than: I won't sign a fiduciary responsibility that makes me unloyal to that, because I'm not going to have two masters I'm split between. Now, if I'm going to steward capital, I have to steward it in a way where on my deathbed I say all of that was the best use of my life energy, and the service of the life that continues after me, I could have done. And there is no way to systematize it, it just takes earnest wrestling with it moment by moment.