Law of 20 years and the average cost of capital.

From The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times by Christopher Lasch.  Originally published in 1984.  

Apocalyptic Survivalism and Ordinary Apatby The debate about space travel and other survivalist fantasies is a debate among people alarmed by the deterioration of social and physical conditions on this planet. It naturally holds no interest for those eternal optimists who see no cause for alarm, who close their ears to disturbing reports, or who cling to the hope that humanity will somehow muddle through. Nor does it hold any interest for the much larger class of people who regard the future as so deeply troubling that it hardly bears looking into at all and who prefer to concern themselves, accordingly, with more immediate and manageable issues. The ignorant masses, as Kurt Saxon calls them, remain indifferent to long-range planning for survival. They have never taken much interest either in a governmental program of civil defense or in privately constructed survival shelters, survival condominiums, survival collectives, or groups like Posse Comitatus or Survival, Inc. Neither have they taken a passionate interest in environmentalism. They support environmental legislation, but only as long as it does not threaten their jobs. Their “apathy” is the despair of environmentalists and survivalists alike. They care about survival only in the most immediate sense    . Compared with the apocalyptic fantasies circulated by those who care about long-range survival, however, their “apathy” has a good deal to commend it.

  The contrast between these two attitudes, the apocalyptic activism of a self-chosen survivalist elite and the ordinary citizen’s indifference to ideologies, emerges very clearly from a recent film, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André. Two friends renew their acquaintance in a New York restaurant and defend the choices that have led them down divergent paths. André has traveled all over the world in search of spiritual enlightenment. Wally has stayed in New York, grubbing for work as a writer and actor and sharing a humdrum domestic existence with his girlfriend. He defends everyday comforts and conveniences against André’s contempt for mindless materialism and mass culture. When he volunteers the information that he sleeps under an electric blanket, he provokes André’s scorn. Turning on an electric blanket, according to André, is “like taking a tranquilizer or … being lobotomized by watching television.” Wally replies that “our lives are tough enough as it is.” “I’m just trying to survive,” he says, “… to earn a living.”

  While Wally contents himself with small pleasures and small attainable goals, André pursues spiritual transcendence, higher states of consciousness. He experiments with Eastern religions, mind-altering spiritual exercises, and communal retreats. He wants to wake up the world, or at least to save the best of our civilization when the rest of it collapses. Returning to New York after a long absence, he sees it as the “new model for the concentration camp”—a prison populated by “lobotomized people” and “robots.” He and his wife “feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties.” They “have actually had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out”—“escape before it’s too late.” “The world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money.” Under these conditions, the only hope is that small groups of the elect will gather in “islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a Dark Age.”

  The encounter between André and Wally juxtaposes two kinds of survivalism, both predicated on the unspoken, unexamined premise that the crisis of twentieth-century society has no collective or political solution. It juxtaposes the banality of everyday existence with the banality of stylish social criticism, which denounces a society of sleepwalkers and tries “to wake up a sleeping audience” with alarming reports of impending catastrophe. “We’re living in the middle of a plague.” Cancer—caused, André adds, by “what we’re doing to the environment”—has reached “plague dimensions. … But is anybody calling it a plague? I mean, in the time of the Black Plague, when the plague hit, people got the hell out.” One kind of survivalism takes refuge in the immediate; the other, in apocalyptic visions of things to come. Both have renounced hope. But whereas André longs to desert the sinking ship, Wally stays in the city he grew up in, a city saturated with memories. “There wasn’t a street—there wasn’t a building—that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school.” André’s disdain for ordinary life, on the other hand, springs from a terrifying sense of its impermanence. “A baby holds your hands, then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?” The contrasting circumstances of these friends’ lives suggest that although a sense of place and a respect for ordinary facts may prevent the imagination from taking wing, they also prevent it from consuming itself in flights of apocalyptic fantasy. André himself detects in the new “monasteries,” where survivors will gather to preserve what remains of civilization, a “sort of self-satisfied elitist paranoia that grows up, a feeling of ‘them’ and ‘us’ that is very unsettling” and leads to a “kind of self-contained, self-ratifying certainty.” In such moods, he is “repelled by the whole story” of his own quest for mystical transcendence.

  The doomsday mentality makes ordinary everyday survivalism like Wally’s look like a model of common sense and democratic decency. Whatever its limitations, everyday survivalism retains a sense of place, a loyalty to familiar surroundings and their associations. It retains something of what Hannah Arendt called a love of the world—the world, that is, of human associations and human works, which give solidity and continuity to our lives. But although it cherishes personal memories, this attitude has little use for history or politics, both of which appear to people like Wally to serve merely as a theater for the play of competing ideologies. The everyday survivalist has deliberately lowered his sights from history to the immediacies of face-to-face relationships. He takes one day at a time. He pays a heavy price for this radical restriction of perspective, which precludes moral judgment and intelligent political activity almost as effectively as the apocalyptic attitude he rightly rejects. It allows him to remain human—no small accomplishment in these times. But it prevents him from exercising any influence over the course of public events. Even his personal life is sadly attenuated. He may reject the fantasy of escape to a mountain retreat or a desert island or another planet, but he still conducts his own life as if he were living in a state of siege. He may refuse to listen to talk of the end of the world, but he unwittingly adopts many of the defensive impulses associated with it. Long-term commitments and emotional attachments carry certain risks under the best of circumstances; in an unstable, unpredictable world they carry risks that people find it increasingly difficult to accept. As long as ordinary men and women have no confidence in the possibility of cooperative political action—no hope of reducing the dangers that surround them—they will find it hard to get along, in short, without adopting some of the tactics of hard-line survivalism in a milder form. The invasion of everyday life by the rhetoric and imagery of terminal disaster leads people to make personal choices that are often indistinguishable in their emotional content from the choices made by those who proudly refer to themselves as survivalists and congratulate themselves on their superior insight into the future course of history.

Returning home from university, brimming with the doom laden bromides of The Population Bomb, and The Club of Rome, I recounted to my father as proof of approaching catastrophe, the fact that we would run out of oil in twenty years.

My engineering father, at that point thirty years into a career in the oil industry gently deflated my penny ante academic knowledge with the observation along the lines of:

All my career we have always been only twenty years away from running out of oil.  When I first noticed that it always remained twenty years in the future, I just assumed we were lucky to keep finding new oil just in time.  Later I realized it was just a matter of finance and economics.

For a given interest rate, it doesn't make sense to hold more than a certain amount of inventory.  In the oil industry, the long term cost of capital means that it doesn't make sense to find more than twenty years inventory of oil.  Change the cost of capital and you change the amount of it makes sense to find.  

It was an important lesson on several fronts.  1) Make sure you compare received academic knowledge to real world knowledge.  2) You can point out so someone that they are naively foolish without making fun of them.  3)  Complex systems are fiendishly complex.  

Every time someone points out some longstanding "threat" or problem or obstacle, I always come back to that point my dad was making.  If it hasn't been resolved, it might not make financial sense to resolve it.  Conversely, another aspect is that all coercive solutions are almost certain to fail because they are failing to take into account some unaccounted for cost.  

Mother Nature and Reality are hard taskmasters obeying many hidden laws.  Such as the Law of 20 years and the average cost of capital.

In the decades since that conversation, various forms of apocalyptic survivalism have come and gone.  After The Population Bomb, there was Fear of Nuclear Winter.  Then there was fear of capitalism and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Income Inequality.  Then climate catastrophism and Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).  Then religious violence and the Global War on Terror.  Then race violence and Black Lives Matter (BLM).  And on and on.

Apocalyptic survivalism keeps morphing and taking new names but it always comes down to authoritarian utopianism with decision by the Elect, the Philosopher Kings, the Vanguard.

André dreams his apocalyptic dreams without ever taking into account the law of 20 years and the average cost of capital.  His vision is to grandiose to take into account the mundane.  Wally lives with the mundane.  The mortgage has to be paid.  The bed made.  The job completed.  The promises kept.  

André hopes to make things better (and himself better) but dreaming big and gambling on the unknown.  He is dreaming beyond the epistemic 20 year limit and thinking that his passion and ideological commitment will make the imagined future real.  André is intellectually exotic but a dangerous idiot.

Wally is the real the engine of the improved future.  He works to make things better given the epistemic limits and constraints of his life and of reality.  He pushes on the epistemic limits in small increments but slowly expands the frontier of the possible, more safely bringing the future into the present.