How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

We are faced with the prospect of runaway climate change, and an understood course of action if it is to be averted. To succeed, that action has to be embraced by the whole planet. This can only be achieved if it is seen to be undertaken with fairness. This in turn requires us to regard all people to be of equal value.

Fortunately that is an adjustment we can begin to welcome, since there is now abundant evidence (see Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's book "The Spirit Level" and Oliver James' Book "Affluenza") that the dramatic inequalities of recent times have caused increasing unhappiness and mental ill health in all of us, both rich and poor.

The only seriously considered option on the table for tackling climate change is called Contraction and Convergence. With this, scientists work out a level of CO2 annual emissions that the planet can cope with, and this is rationed equally for everyone on the planet, but phased in over some years to enable the high CO2 emitters like ourselves to adjust. The main opponents are the developed countries which have to make the greatest adjustments, but we have a weak case as we will continue to have an advantage from our developed infrastructure, which was achieved at the expense of creating the problem. One difficulty is that the longer an agreement is put off, the smaller the annual personal allowance will become, since CO2 keeps on accumulating and now scientists estimate that it remains in the atmosphere for around 1000 years compared with the 100 years previously thought. If we delay too long, then the allowance will eventually fall to zero and start to go negative.

The question is "How do we reach the desirable goal of a more just world community and cooperation in tackling the threat of climate change, when we see around us such powerful vested interests desperately trying to shore up the status quo and also hang on to immense earning inequalities?"

Diamond concludes with the hope that mass communications and shared knowledge of today will be the tools that help us take appropriate action to avert the greatest human collapse of all time. John Keane in his new book "The Life and Death of Democracy" has a similar view. He uses the term 'monitory democracy' for the multiple means citizens have to scrutinise, complain about and resist their governments.

I see the banking crisis and the MP scandal as important events for opening our eyes to the emperor's lack of clothes, to a realization that the common sense of ordinary people should be what guides our actions.

We should have realised this when many building societies were demutualised in the 1990s and everyone connected to them, borrowers and depositors, received a payout. How was that possible? The answer was that they were then allowed a higher loan to deposit ratio. The city traders' miracle was based on lending increasingly more money than was deposited in banks and increasingly making those unsecured loans. (A mortgage greater than the value of the house amounts to an unsecured loan.) Robert Peston described this as pyramid banking. It matched Diamond's 3rd reason for collapse perfectly. What is extraordinary is how the bankers are unable to recognise their culpability, and cling on to beliefs that they are worth more than the rest of us, and many times more at that. But we are able to see that, and maybe even able to transfer that insight to our inordinate wealth and environmental destructiveness compared with the poorest people in the world.

We have also seen that MPs, ordinary people elected to represent us, may not be free from the moral frailties of the rest of us, when unchecked. What has happened enables us to reject such statements as "Trust me. If you knew what I know, you would support the war."

These experiences encourage us to respect the strength of arguments rather than the importance of the people making them.

What all this does is put extraordinary responsibility upon us, the generation with access to knowledge and information, to use that information to demand proper responses to the immense challenges facing us.