YOGI BERRA, EXTRACTION STATE FUTURISTS, AND THE ALL-SYSTEM ITERATIVE APPROACH

Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra played catcher for the New York Yankees for 18 seasons. He was voted the Major League’s Most Valuable Player 3 times, won 10 World Championships, more than any other player, and is beloved for philosophical observations, known as Yogi-isms:

"Never answer an anonymous letter."

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is”

Yogi’s reflections about predictions are relevant today:

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

The extraction state is fueled by predatory levels of commodification, everything’s for sale, including predictions about the future. Futurists, the optimistic face of capitalism, serve as foresight consultants, scenario forecasters, strategic planners, keynote speakers, and socio-political commenters. Not surprisingly, their predictions don’t mention overshoot and planetary overheating, they rehash instead perversions of an extraction-based future; accelerationism, abundance theory, the Singapore model, AGI, joint-stock nationhood, and the dark enlightenment. 

Futurists ignore a fundamental Yogi-ism: "The future ain't what it used to be."

The symptoms of ecological overshoot complicate extraction-based predictions. Climate breakdown (GHG driven global heating) is an exponential process that creates tipping points, where one element of collapse, for example summers with no arctic ice may trigger another element of collapse, for example destabilizing changes in ocean currents. Futurist linear-based trends and data are worthless for predicting exponential driven outcomes. And as futurists are fond of emphasizing, it’s not the invention but ecosystems which drive the future (not the horseless carriage but the suburb, recreational vehicles, cars as status symbols, parking lots, and gas stations). But ecosystems are collapsing.

Foresight consultants, scenario forecasters, strategic planners do what they do with numbers, charts, and graphs, analyzing humans as objects, potential consumers of the commodity based economic system. But market analysis assumes market levels of risk. For example, a 5% error rate may be an acceptable risk concerning sales projections for a new style of athletic shoe. Predicting the impacts of climate collapse, however, must consider precautionary principal levels of risk because planetary overheating threatens human life. That same 5% error rate would not be acceptable if it involved the safe outcome of an airplane flight. Extraction-based futurists have a difficult time predicting social outcomes because it requires analyzing humans as humans instead of humans as marketable objects.

A new methodology is needed to undertake an accurate analysis of the human consequences of climate breakdown – the all-system iterative approach. As explained by Roger Hallam:

The reason for this failure is the conventional methodologies' analysis of only parts of the system, falsely assuming that these processes are independent of other parts of the system. Therefore, it assumes linear rather than non-linear change. . . This approach may have made sense in the past when all parts of the system were not linked up, but that is no longer the case. Only an all-system analysis can, therefore, make accurate predictions. There is now only one system, and that is the all-Earth system. To understand any part of the system, it is necessary to look at all.

Why The Human Race is Going Extinct this Century provides a concise, scientifically verifiable overview of the all-system iterative approach, as well as providing decadal iterations of the real-life consequences of hothouse earth.  It is essential read for anyone concerned about predictions, climate, social collapse, and new nationalist and fascist regimes.

https://rogerhallam.com/blog-extinct/?ref=roger-hallam-newsletter