Summary of Three Part Article Series

These later became the first three chapters of Analytical Activism. Here is a short summary of each article:

Part 1 - How the Environmental Movement Can Find Its Way Again

Environmental organizations are failing to achieve their objectives because they use an ad hoc, common sense, event oriented problem solving process. This worked fine on the easy problems, which were the ones encountered first. But it fails disastrously on the more difficult problems, such as climate change and abnormally high species extinction rates, because it leads to pushing on low leverage points.

This can be remedied by adopting the same approach that science adopted in the early 17th century: a formal, hypothesis driven, systems thinking oriented process. For scientists this was the Scientific Method. A similar process suitable for environmentalists is presented. It results in the ability to identify high leverage points, which leads to a much higher probability of solving the problem.

Part 2 - Why Environmentalists Are Facing Such Hostile Opposition

The problem solving process is applied. It shows that the political powerplace is characterized by two "dueling loops," each competing for the same uncommitted supporters. The "race to the bottom" loop is dominant most of the time because it has inherent structural advantages over the "race to the top." Because the race to the bottom requires generous amounts of falsehood and favoritism to work, that is what characterizes politics today.

The modern corporation and its allies is the New Dominant Life Form. Because it is the dominant special interest, it controls the race to the bottom, and thus the political systems in industrialized countries. It doesn't control all of each system, but it controls enough to cause the rules of the game to be defined in its favor. It also controls enough to acquire the favoritism needed to remain dominant. Corporations are each in their own life or death struggle, based on who does the best at maximizing the net present value of profits. This causes the life form as a whole to be locked into a preference for unsustainable behavior. This is why environmentalists are facing such hostile opposition.

The good news is there is a high leverage point that has not yet been tried. This is raising the general ability to detect political deception. If this can be done, the race to the bottom will collapse, the race to the top will become dominant, and the global environmental sustainability problem will then be solved in short order. That is, if it is still solvable.

Part 3 - How to Raise the General Ability to Detect Political Deception

It takes six carefully engineered solution elements working together to do this. These are presented. The highlight is Truth Ratings and Corruption Ratings.

Truth Ratings work by rating the truth of important statements made by important politicians. A Truth Rating is the probability an argument is true. Corruption Ratings are an overall measure of how corrupt a politician is. These two types of ratings are similar to credit ratings and product ratings, which have proven to be indispensable.

If the organizations doing the ratings are credible and the public trusted the results, a race to the top would begin. Politicians would compete to see who could be the most truthful in the fullest sense of the word, and therefore the most helpful. Campaigns would become based on reason and truth rather than rhetoric. Legislation and executive decisions would also be based on reason, rather than partisan considerations or the demands of special interests. The result, we believe, would be the proper prioritization of the world's problems, which would result in the fastest possible solution of the global environmental sustainability problem.

This page is one of the articles at Thwink.org