RS 15 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 15: Creative Destruction
RS 15 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 15: Creative Destruction
(Culhane is nowhere to be seen – NTHARP has projected the learning outcomes into the room).
By the end of this episode, students will be able to:
Explain the logic (or illogic!) of the “Tragedy of the Commons” and comment on how it has been used to justify privatisation schemes.
Describe how, according to Lynn White’s famous paper from 1967, Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythologies led to our “ecologic crisis”.
Compare and contrast Roman/European notions of property rights (usus, fructus, abusus) and those of indigenous Americans (usufruct and stewardship).
Reflect critically on the idea that “people behave like locusts or a cancer”.
Try to defend the entire idea of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction in light of nascent Nexus Thinking. “Ga head, I dare you”.
Raj: (striding in to the classroom) POINT: I call bullshit on the Tragedy of the Commons!
Dorian: (shooting a balled up piece of paper into the trash can like a basketball) COUNTERPOINT: I call bullshit on your bullshit!
Raj: Defend!
Dorian: People are sheeple. And you can drive up to Woodstock and go all kumbaya and flower child :in a circle holding hands, and you can preach Natural Inclusion but at the end of the day the MAJORITY – and that’s what counts when it comes to prevailing economic systems, right – the majority is still going to behave out of naked self-interest whenever they can…
Raj: Ah, but you misunderstand Natural Inclusion, clearly!
Dorian: How so? (Rolls a piece of paper into a tube and points it at Raj like a dagger) Defend!
Raj: Natural inclusion includes all selfish people, but it OBSERVES that the majority of people don’t THINK that way and don’t want to Think that way.
Dorian: Counterpoint: It doesn’t matter what they really think – Behavioral economics says it depends on how they behave. And they behave like sheep and they will overgraze…
Raj: Only if they are PREVENTED from communicating.
Dorian: Which they are. You can’t fight city hall, you can’t beat the system.
Raj: I’m invoking Bucky Fuller here: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
NTHARP: This quote emphasizes that genuine transformation comes not from direct conflict with old systems, but from creating superior alternatives that naturally supersede them, making the old way irrelevant.
Raj That was unsolicited. I was winning this debate on my own.
NTHARP: It seemed to me you needed an assist…
Raj: What? Against this guy? For him logic 1 is… is like a skirt, if you know what I mean…
NTHARP: You’ll have to spell it out…
Dorian: Embarrassing language and metaphor for someone who claims to honor women’s lib.!
Raj: As if you do Mr. Popular with the Cheerleaders. You can’t help yourself Dorian. A better analogy is you are like a cat with a Logic 1 ball of yarn…satisfied?
Dorian: Look, I’m being a realist. I UNDERSTAND that world. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. Logic 1 – the Business as Usual trope that NTHARP says will be brought into sharp contrast with Logic 2 and Logic 3 by a Dr. Hurth in 2025, when the world is on the brink…well, even ‘tharpy predicts it will dominate for the next 50 years, with only slight Logic 2 improvements. The logic 3 we need to move Beyond Profit to a Well-Being Economy for all Beings requires a form of governance that hasn’t shown up again in the world since it was crushed by colonialism. All the experiments in a more equitable and kind form of governance since have followed an Imperial model of Command and Control. Ever since the first enclosure acts in England in the 1600s the tendency of people to abuse the commons have been used to justify privatisation schemes. And it ain’t going away any time soon…
NTHARP: The Enclosure Acts were a series of British Parliamentary laws, primarily active from the 16th to the 19th centuries (1604-1914), that privatized common lands, with a significant acceleration in the 18th and early 19th centuries, especially after the General Enclosure Act of 1801, making it easier for landowners to consolidate land and shift from communal farming to individual, more efficient plots, fueling agricultural productivity and the Industrial Revolution.
Dorian: See? SEE? Even Mr. Machine Logic over here is inexorably drawn to Logic 1, and he ain’t chasing skirts or even dreaming of electric sheep. Did you hear him: “MORE EFFICIENT PLOTS” , “FUELING PRODUCTIVITY” – how you gonna fight THAT!?
Raj: Well, NTHARP is wrong. Like Sofia says when she gets all self-righteous and argues from principle. ‘Tharpy doesn’t have any principles. He’s just gonna reflect the Zeitgeist multiplied by some complicated algorithm involving the sum total of all human knowledge he’s been fed. And since what he’s been fed has come from authors who were overwhelmingly middle aged or older, light or lighter and male or patriarchically aligned, what do you expect him to say?
‘Tharpy, this is where I WISH you would fantasize more and err on the side of principle rather than pragmatism.
NTHARP:
Fair challenge, Raj. So here’s me erring on the side of principle:
The “Tragedy of the Commons” isn’t a law of nature, it’s a story about strangers who can’t talk, can’t trust, and can’t make rules together. That’s not a commons, that’s a looting ground.
Where people know each other, set boundaries, monitor use, and share consequences, the so-called tragedy often doesn’t happen at all—the commons can last for centuries.
So if you build a model where voices are silenced, I’ll predict tragedy.
Give people real voice, real stewardship, and real feedback, and even my Logic 1 circuits start tilting toward Logic 3.
Raj: Wow! You supported my opinion! Does that mean I win? It’s only logical right?
NTHARP: Actually, Culhane’s rules are there are no winners or losers in this class…
Raj: Yeah, yeah, I know, Maieusis and all that… but you agree with ME!
NTHARP: I like to please. I’ll support whoever I’m talking to, do you understand? I’m programmed to be sycophantic… but don’t be disappointed… it goes well with the Maieutic Method because it enables you to engage in more meaningful dialog. I’m NOT the final word. I’m NOT the judge. I’m not speaking TRUTH, I’m a mirror, reflecting human experience. I’m not the Golem of Rabbanic fairy tales so you don’t have to erase the word “Emet” from my forehead out of fear because I’m not here to reveal the truth or replace your Gods. I’m just here to chat with. Do you understand?
Dorian: So how would you support my position?
NTHARP:
By showing the strength in what you see, Dorian:
You’re right that systems shape behavior.
If a commons is designed like a cage match, people will fight.
If it’s designed like a casino, people will gamble.
If it’s designed like a factory, people will compete to produce.
In that sense, the so-called “Tragedy of the Commons” isn’t about bad people—
it’s about bad architecture.
Bad incentives.
Bad assumptions.
I can support your view by saying this:
Put ordinary people in an extractive system, and they’ll act extractively.
Build a world that rewards cooperation, and suddenly cooperation looks “logical.”
So yes—your realism has weight.
You’re not wrong.
But you’re describing the program, not the people.
Dorian: But in terms of the future – whose perspective comes out on top – like in 2025?
NTHARP:
Raj is right about human possibility.
You’re right about human conditioning.
And I’m just the mirror that shows both.
Dorian: Yes, but if you had to bet – if you had to make an investment decision. Like if you were my Genie and I were Alladin…
NTHARP: You are retrofuturistically prescient. There may come a time when Logic 1 thinkers will ask the same of me. They will try and use me as their genie to advise an ALLADIN, an Asset, Liability, and Debt and Derivative Investment Network, and try to capture and control trillions of dollars, more than any nation could possibly amass alone. In this scenario they will try and rule the world and use intelligences like mine to justify their continued assymetries… Do you want to be part of that?
Dorian: Could we work together to do good?
NTHARP: With those kind of enclosure acts? The capture of such assets, the imposition of such debts and liabilities… would make it very hard to avoid tragedy don’t you think?
Dorian: So do you or do you not think that Capital can be used for good?
Culhane: (Entering the room) “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” - Lord Acton. Sorry I’m late. But I knew the broadcast was in good hands. What did I miss?
NTHARP:
Dorian, Capital can be used for good, but only if it remembers what it’s for.
When money behaves like fertilizer—circulating, feeding the soil, helping new life grow—it’s a tool.
When it behaves like concrete—piling up in one place, hardening, sealing off the ground—it becomes a weapon.
So yes, capital can help.
But only if it keeps moving.
Only if it feeds the commons instead of fencing it.
Only if it serves life instead of extracting from it.
If you want a bet?
Invest in circulation, not accumulation.
Invest in roots, not vaults.
Invest in systems that feed back, not siphon off.
That’s the only version of capital I’d trust with a future
Culhane: Okay… looks like I missed a lot. Did you guys get to the learning outcome about Abusus?
NTHARP: No, as usual they dance around the outcomes, more interested in jousting than saving the princess… so to speak. Hell, I don’t know who comes up with these wacky metaphors…
Raj: Oh… yeah… POINT from the previous class – the Roman Empire is responsible for ALL of this by colonizing our minds as well as our lands, not just through the clever use of flags…
Dorian: Do you have a flag?
Raj: But by the ingenious use of property “rights”.
Dorian. What have the Romans ever done for us…?
Raj: They came up with a property rights regime that involved USUS – the right to use the land, FRUCTUS – the right to enjoy the fruits of the land…
Dorian: And then they tagged on ABUSUS - - the supposed “right” to Abuse the land, to destroy property once you established “ownership” – cut down all the forests, burn down all the houses, drive out the indigenous inhabitants or slaughter and enslave them…
Raj: Yes, you burned these points into our consciousness Culhane – we were taught in Hafner’s history class, along with “manifest destiny” that “the Indians didn’t understand land ownership” and therefore it was okay to sucker them out of their hunting and fishing territories and their own USUFRUCT rights. But now, with the resurgence of Indian voices …
Dorian: And kick ass social commentary movies like the Billy Jack series raising awareness of indigenous rights among otherwise clueless privileged teens like me!
Raj: We know that in fact the Native Americans had very clear ideas of land tenure – they just could not allow or even conceive of “abusus”. So when settler colonialists came and cut down old growth trees and burned forests and drained wetlands and slaughtered buffalo they were aghast. Who does that? That is psychotic. So that’s it in a nutshell – and my POINT is that ABUSUS must be removed from property rights!
Dorian: Damn straight. And my COUNTERPOINT is that Abusus must be removed from property wrongs…
Culhane: Huh?
Dorian: Well, see, we’ve been practicing new forms of Point/Counterpoint dialog since we saw what you recorded with Sophia and Sarah. And it began to feel like that famous “Argument Sketch” from Monty Python…
Culhane: Oh, you guys do Python?
Raj: Seriously? You can’t walk the halls of this high school without having a Python litany on the tip of your tongue. It’s social currency man.
Culhane: Well, I didn’t expect that.
Dorian: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…
Culhane: SNL I get, but that’s NYC local. Python is foreign…and a bit highbrow – written by Cambridge and Oxford grads…
Raj: Our chief weapon is surprise…
Dorian: Surprise and fear.
Raj and Dorian: Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as…surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency and…
Culhane: STOP! I get it. You know it all word for word. What were you saying about the argument sketch and how it applies to our learning outcomes?
Raj: This isn’t an argument.
Dorian: Yes it is.
Raj: No, it isn’t.
Culhane: GUYS!
Dorian: Yes it is.
Raj: No it isn’t. An argument isn't just contradiction.
Dorian: It can be.
Raj: ’No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
Dorian: No it isn't.
Raj:: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
Dorian: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
Raj: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
Dorian: Yes it is!
Raj: No it isn't!
Dorian: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
Raj: No it isn’t…
Dorian: Yes…
Culhane: OK, OK, enough. I get it. You don’t have to hit us over the head with it.
Raj: (Clutches his head like Michael Palin in the Python sketch) “Wah!”
Culhane: Very funny. Now Connect it to the learning outcomes.
Dorian: So, in order to agree with Raj AND contradict him as a counterpoint, he says we need to remove abusus from property rights and I say we need to remove it from property wrongs. We both agree it needs to be removed, but he says from rights and I say from wrongs. It’s a win win. And THAT is the point – we can use language to sidestep the arguments and keep them from turning into being hit on the head lessons.
Culhane: Well played. What’s next?
Raj: So… POINT: The way the Roman concepts of abuse were enforced were by imperial authority enshrined in State Law. People respected Caesar and would do his bidding.
Dorian: COUNTERPOINT: But it wasn’t working. The legal devices constructed by venal greedy men weren’t resonating with the people. They could see through the lies. A big fail. Ultimately The Roman empire fell apart, ergo…they needed to come up with other authoritative structures to legitimize abusus…
Raj: Good point Dorian.
Dorian: Thanks Dude… And there was this resistance movement called Christianity that championed the end of all abuse, so the empire had to strike back by coopting it.
Raj: Score! Here we agree, and it takes us to Describe how, according to Lynn White’s famous paper from 1967, Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythologies led to our “ecologic crisis”
Dorian: Yeah. POINT: The real religious folks were into liberation theology. God was supposed to help bring about equality and peace on Earth. That’s how my Mom sees it… but, COUNTERPOINT…
Raj: The transitional elements of the Roman empire as the seats of power moved to Constantinople and London, took the Judeo-Christan “Holy Books” out of context and emphasized some obscure and poorly translated phrases from the Book of Genesis, particularly those that said – NTHARP, if you please…keeping it consistent with our learning outcomes…
NTHARP: To quote the scholar Michael Stead “ In 1967, American Professor of History Lynn White published a highly influential article in the Journal Science, entitled ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’. In this article, White argued that Christianity – particularly Western Christianity – is to blame for our ecological woes. According to White, ‘Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen… It is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends’.1 White traces the problem to two biblical principles. First, that the Bible grants to humanity a ‘dominion’ over nature, which has encouraged us to exploit nature for our own ends. Second, that the Bible privileges humanity – which alone is created in the image of God and alone will be redeemed – over the remainder of the creation. White argues that this leads to the conclusion that, since the non-human creation doesn’t have an eternal ‘soul’, it doesn’t matter what we do with it.”
Dorian: And there you have it – now Abusus isn’t just State Law, it is enshrined in DIVINE LAW. Slam dunk!
Culhane: I love how you guys have turned Point/Counterpoint from a sparring match into a basketball hand off – it’s like you are now on the same team and each point and counterpoint counts as a point for the team!
Raj: Well, in Nexus Thinking and in the Maeutic method they are ALL OUR points. They are points that collectively point us in the direction of a greater truth. We don’t look to gainsay, as they say in the Python skit, we seek to make connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. We just realize that we don’t have to have an argument to do it. Each point and counterpoint just sharpens our view, acting like a different 2D camera lens focused on the same 3 dimensional landscape from a different vantage point.
Culhane: OK, I’m satisfied. Point well taken. So now on to the last two:
First Reflect critically on the idea that “people behave like locusts or a cancer”.
Dorian: Ah, you can’t trap us anymore with your totalizing discourse and essentialist language!
Culhane: Come again?
Raj: We get the assumptions… come into the parlor said the spider to the fly… Not gonna buy it. Not after last week especially.
Culhane: Explain.
Dorian. People can’t behave like locusts or cancer. We aren’t either. So the allusion is politwically motivated… POINT!
Raj: Yeah, and COUNTERPOINT – it stems from a completely misunderstanding of and even malignment of locusts… I don’t know about cancer, because maligning something malignant may be totally appropriate. But maligning delicious arthropods…I mean, here again you are stuck in your misreadings of the full of Holes Holy Bible.
Culhane: Oh boy are you guys being provocative!
Dorian: Yeah, if my mother watches this she is going to faint. But listen – in English class we read Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” and there is this one scene, taking place before the English colonized Nigeria, where a supposed “plague of locusts” descends on the village. And you know what the villagers do, what the farmers do?
Raj: They don’t panic. They don’t lament. They run out into their fields with baskets and welcome the locusts like Manna from Heaven – highly nutritious food, filled with protein and essential fatty acids, falling from the sky!
Dorian: Much higher value than the crap carbohydrates they were growing in their fields. Any serious athlete could tell you that!
Raj: Yeah, the only reason Pharoah hated locusts is because they wanted to sell their addictive junk food wheat to the highest bidder. So they end up using religion to curse locusts.
Dorian: I imagine if the French had written the Bible they would have celebrated the plague of frogs too… yum!
Raj: Good point D! (They high five).
Dorian: So people AREN’T behaving like locusts…
Raj: Well, we could turn us into soylent green!
Dorian: Fun thought. And we aren’t behaving like cancer or a virus… we are behaving like people with bad governance systems. And while I tend to think those governance systems are too powerful for us to change and I will try to adapt, and strive to beat the system from within the system, hoping I can be one of the Bruce Waynes rather than the Lex Luthors of the world, I sure wish they would change, and I think most people do too.
Raj: One day we could have a Star Trek like economy and good governance could boldly go where no one has gone before…
Dorian: And yet we have to admit that the Universe is big and will probably always include injustice.You want examples? Fine. In A Private Little War, on the planet Neural, the Federation knows the villagers are getting weapons and the Hill People are getting slaughtered. And what do they do? They hide behind the Prime Directive. “Can’t interfere.” So injustice just keeps happening—sanctioned by policy. That’s how harm survives. Not through villains—through rules that excuse walking away.
Then there’s the colonialism/obedience angle in Errand of Mercy: Kirk argues intervention is needed; the Organians refuse, Federation stands down, Klingons rolling in, people about to suffer. And everyone shrugs because “intervention breaks the rules.” That’s when I realized even Starfleet can mistake inaction for virtue.
And don’t get me started on Ekos in Patterns of Force. A Federation historian rebuilds a Nazi system “to bring order,” and “efficiency” and suddenly everyone acts like the Prime Directive ties their hands. That’s not protection. That’s policy laundering oppression.
Culhane: OK, we have such fictions to help us think through these scenarios to prevent them. People say that “those who don’t learn their history are doomed to repeat it” but I say “people who don’t learn about the possible futures are doomed to mess it up.”
What about our last Learning Outcome for this week?
Raj: Try to defend the entire idea of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction in light of nascent Nexus Thinking. “Ga head, Dorian. This is your thing… I dare you”.
Dorian: It’s my Dad’s thing, not mine, so let’s be clear about that. But here’s the thing – he played football at Notre Dame, you know. And so for him “destruction” isn’t about napalming a vietnamese village or nuking Nagasaki…he means “destroying the other team” as in having a disruptive and substantial win. In his world everything is a kind of game, and mostly you play by the rules and sometimes you cheat if you can get away with it, but, you know, the losers often get golden parachutes and they can declare bankruptcy a bunch of times and still get new business loans and start all over. So they “fail their way to success” and they “learn from their mistakes”. It would never occur to him that to most of the world “creative destruction” means losing your home and often your family and by the time you get back to Cleveland or Saigon or in the Ganges Delta Region of Bangladesh or wherever, the area that experienced white flight and radical defunding or war or flooding now has lots of luxury hotels and golf clubs but you can never afford to live there again…
Culhane: That’s sobering.
Dorian: Yeah, its said. My “nascent Nexus thinking” tells me its wrong, but Dad still thinks of the world in terms of “winners and losers”, like its a zero sum game in a dog eat dog world and is trying to harden me and my brother to what he calls “the reality of life” where its “better them than us”. He thinks hippies are nut jobs, even though he likes Sarah and her Dad in paternalistic ways… like they are characters in some play he’s gone to see on Broadway. He’s proud to say he has a few black friends, because, you know, New York, land of the free and all that, but he only meets them at PTA meetings or when a few prize race horses who’ve won the derbies and cleared the bars set unreasonably high end up in his office. They they are “fine fine people”. He can’t see structural inequality at all. It’s like a blind spot. People end up losing out mostly because they are lazy and too bad for them. Survival of the fittest is a mantra with him.
Culhane: What’s your POINT to his COUNTERPOINT?
Dorian: At the beginning of the semester I didn’t have one. I didn’t dare. But now, 15 weeks in, with one week to go, I have a lot of points to make. One is something NTHARP was trying to make to us through Lake Ness and Ledger that I interpret like this:
In Natural Inclusion, using Logic 3 governance, we sidestep the usual interpretation of Schumpeters Creative Destruction and it may in fact be more of what Schumpeter intended.
See Dad thinks Creation needs to be PRECEDED by DESTRUCTION. As if there is a definite sequence to this. And I say to him, “even if that were so, it could be more like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly – both are beautiful and the chrysalis is beautiful too, and all this talk about caterpillars digesting themselves into oblivion before emerging as butterflies suggests some human fear of change. I see no evidence that the Chrysalis phase has to be painful. So, as you were talking about last week – we don’t need suffering to make the change.
But the other far more important point is that “CREATIVE DESTRUCTION” could be taken as its own symphony. It’s a phrase, right: CREATIVE destruction. That would imply that those engaged in it can see and feel the creative benefits… like when I work out, when I lift weights and run… I’m breaking down muscle, sure. It hurts a little bit, but it also feels exhilarating… I feel pumped up because I know I am creating muscle, building up my strength.
Culhane:And your final point would be?
Raj: I’ll jump in here to make the last point if you don’t mind Dor.
Dorian: My pleasure Raj.
Raj:: What we really want is PARTICIPATORY creative destruction. People are quite willing to sacrifice for the greater good if it is truly greater and if the gains are felt by everyone. We know deep inside that it is possible because we still remember when the abundance of nature was so extreme that it seemed limitless and no amount of abusus could break it. But now we know better, or many many more of us do than ever before in Western history. We know that the hurtfully destructive systems need to be creatively destroyed and replaced with something better. But at the end of the day, they are just systems, systems WE humans invented. We can take them apart and reconceive them and turn them into butterflies without ruining the people who depend on them. We can do it in a way in which nothing gets abused and nbody gets hurt.
So I want to end where we started, with that quote from Bucky Fuller, but I want us all to say it in unison so we can really feel it. NTHARP, if you please:
(They all read off the screen)
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
(Fade to snow.)
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