In June I attended the twentieth reunion of my business school class. One of the events was for entrepreneurs working in social areas that included people giving fast talks on their work.
Although my work is less starting a company than starting a movement, with Lincoln and Washington as role models more than Edison, I participated. I thought I’d share the text I presented from. Sorry I don’t have video. Also sorry I took so long to post it. The file has been sitting on my computer desktop for months.
I wasn’t always known as the first of 4.5 billion city-dwellers to disconnect his home from the electric grid. Many people were never connected, but they aren’t polluting or depleting. I haven’t filled a load of trash since 2019 or flown since 2016.
It’s resulted in coverage in the New York Times, Daily Show, and media all over the world.
But it’s also a distraction because I am not an environmentalist.
If I’m not an environmentalist, what am I doing?
Two big discoveries came from actually acting.
The first discovery: it’s not deprivation or sacrifice.
I had learned to expect it to cost more, take longer, and many other problems, etc. Hands-on practical experience showed the opposite.
Which raised the question: Why did our cultural beliefs predict the opposite of what happened?
The second discovery: pollution and depletion are just one of many of what I call Our Collective Problems, which I distinguish from wedge issues, which are just different opinions, like abortion or the death penalty.
In Our Collective Problems nobody wants the outcome but we’re all contributing.
They include polarization, isolation, many AI problems, racism, fascism, national insecurity, never having time for family, and I could go on but you’ve read the headlines.
I’ve been combining anthropology, psychology, economics, and more to find the root causes and genuine solutions.
Actually, I found the solution. Our Declaration and Constitution actually describe how to live together without hurting each other. We just haven’t been enforcing three main requirements:
- The consent of the governed
- That no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law
- Property rights as understood by the framers, ratifiers, and public
Pollution and depletion violate all three.
My project is to enforce the Constitution to solve Our Collective Problems.
This is leadership not environmentalism, nor selling a product or technology. It means something that I know sounds crazy, backward, or impossible, which is zero pollution and depletion, which means zero fossil fuels or uranium as the final goal of a long project. History has shown the alternative to enforcing the Constitution: civil war, tyranny, or invasion, preceded by civic breakdown.
I know that I just raised many objections which seem so insurmountable that you may well think I’m ignorant, crazy, or stupid. I felt all of them too.
The reasons for the experiments were to validate those objections so I could stop. Changing culture is hard. My life would be easier not to try. I’ve been trying to prove that zero wouldn’t work or even wouldn’t be rewarding. We admire Abraham Lincoln but we don’t want to live his life.
It’s actually fun.
[If time permits]
So far, zero pollution and depletion remain as practical, pragmatic, and desirable as zero slavery, just hard to imagine from our legitimizing myths, however false.
Step 6 is a liberated market—liberated from coercions and violations of those minimum requirements. We’ll see a blossoming of innovation, just ones that don’t violate the consent of the governed or deprive people of life, liberty, and property. Isn’t that what we want, more than innovation that violates those things? First there would be a reconstruction.
Steps 1 through 4 start from you and me, here and now, leading to the overwhelming popular support necessary for the government to act. Generally they involve a mindset shift followed by a process of continual improvement, then building community.
My vision is a world free of Our Collective Problems. Not peace on earth or an end to all suffering, but not driving each other to outcomes nobody wants, blaming others for what we’re all collectively doing.
The work to get there is rewarding and, yes, even fun.
You probably know that a short talk is harder to prepare than a long one. Along the way to preparing the short one, I prepared a longer one. I’ll include it here too for those interested in more.
The Ten-Minute Version
I wasn’t always known as the first of 4.5 billion city-dwellers to disconnect his apartment from the electric grid. Many people were never connected, but they also didn’t disconnect, but they aren’t polluting or depleting as much so weren’t causing the problems.
It’s resulted in coverage in the New York Times, New Yorker, New York Post, TIME, the Daily Show, and plenty in Europe, Asia, Australia, and more. I haven’t filled a load of trash at home since 2019 or flown since 2016.
But it’s also a distraction because I am not an environmentalist.
On the contrary, they make my skin crawl. I believe that future generations, if we make it, will see them as we see eugenicists. It’s hard to put aside what eugenics evolved into, but it started with people meaning well, including WEB Du Bois, hardly a racist. After they got support and political power, they stopped paying attention to science that conflicted with their driving beliefs.
If I’m not an environmentalist, what am I doing?
To me, asking about solar panels and how I light my apartment is like asking Martin Luther King during the bus boycott what shoes he wears and if walking is good exercise. Yes, his shoes are important, but he was working on a long-term vision to restore freedom and equality.
Two big discoveries came from actually acting, not just talking or suggesting others act, and developing Hands-On Practical Experience. I ask people if they can name an environmentalist even trying to stop polluting and depleting. None can. Maybe Greta before, but she seems to have moved on.
I see zero leadership, which I distinguish from management, in sustainability or environmentalism. Without hands-on practical experience, none can speak with credibility or integrity.
The first discovery: it’s not deprivation or sacrifice—not for me, nor when I lead leadership workshops for participants, who say things like, “This is what I’ve been looking for my entire life.” Sadly, every message I’ve heard says we have to make our lives and society worse, with no guarantee it will work. This message is discouraging. It’s also wrong, based on not trying.
I had learned to expect it to cost more, take longer, be less convenient, not scale, not address people without access, etc. Hands-on practical experience showed the opposite. Acting saved money and time, was more convenient, and helped those vulnerable or without access, results repeated with workshop participants.
The question became: Why did our cultural beliefs predict exactly the opposite of what happened?
The second discovery: pollution and depletion are just one of many of what I call Our Collective Problems, which I distinguish from wedge issues. Wedge issues arise from different values or perspectives: abortion, tax levels, death penalty. We handle them with democracy so people can live together without hurting each other. Effective government leads people to engage more. Your view may not prevail this time, but may the next time.
In Our Collective Problems nobody wants the outcome but we’re all contributing.
No one wants a polluted, depleted world, but we all pollute and deplete. We almost can’t eat breakfast without unwrapping plastic or burning fossil fuels.
No one wants polarization, isolation, fragile children, or the many problems of artificial intelligence, but we all get stuck in media bubbles, spend hours a day on social media, helicopter parent, and use AI more and more.
The Left and Right both think the other is causing racism, fascism, and national insecurity while they’re solving it. Each says, “They don’t care about reason any more, and would rather burn it down than lose. They just want power whatever it takes” so feels they have to do whatever it takes to stop them.
Other Collective Problems include arms races, immigration, dependence on resources and supply chains outside our control, extinctions, desertification, capitalism run amok, socialism run amok, and I could go on but you’ve read the headlines.
Typical attempts to understand the underlying systems end up phenomenological, just describing what we see, not root causes. For example, national security issues get traced to the Cold War or WWII, occasionally the Civil or Revolutionary Wars. Racism gets traced to 1619 or the Age of Exploration turning to exploitation. Some just say it’s human nature.
These explanations can’t explain what happened before, why now, or how humans lived otherwise in countless times and places.
If you don’t mind some hand waving, research beyond just recent history combining anthropology, psychology, economics, strategy, and political science reveal clear roots not in human nature or history of recent millennia, but involving the formation of civilization in the material conditions that led to the formation of dominance hierarchy—more casually known as tyranny—imperialism, pollution, and depletion, beginning after the last ice age.
No one planned these political structures or could have predicted their outcomes then or now. On the contrary, they resulted from people making the choices that anyone, including you and I, would have made in those situations, not knowing what would come later. They induced people to act against their values, for example to withhold and control necessary resources, to control people’s land and labor, and so on, which led people to create what psychologists call “legitimizing myths,”—that is, rationalizations and justifications to protect themselves from the emotions that come from violating their values. As the structures grew, the myths grew into a major part of culture: unquestioned beliefs.
These legitimizing myths and culture that formed millennia ago haven’t changed because the conditions causing them haven’t either. They drive the two effects I observed: 1) that hands-on practical experience in reducing pollution and depletion belies what culture predicts and 2) Our Collective Problems.
Examples of legitimizing myths today include, that we’ll revert to the Stone Age, that we’ll die in our thirties, if we don’t then China and Russia may beat us, that we’ll lose touch with remote family, that technology will solve our problems, that growth will, that legislation will, that we’ll undo progress, that we’ll lose modern medicine, and so on.
History shows one remedy for tyranny, imperialism, and their harms as long as the conditions driving them persist, at least that I know of: a democratic hierarchy.
Tyranny is very stable. Tyrannies can endure when everyone in them suffer. When tyrants are deposed, the tyranny almost always remains, just with new tyrants running them.
Democratic hierarchy takes work. The most enduring written constitution today is the US’s. It contains many necessary protections such as freedom of speech, the press, separation of powers, and so on. By necessary, I mean that if we drop any of them, we tend toward tyranny, civil war, or invasion, preceded by civic breakdown. We faced two major struggles—at our founding and reckoning over huge violations of these necessary protections in slavery, as well as treatment of Native Americans and depriving adults of the vote.
Note that the problems weren’t that the Declaration or Constitution didn’t contain the protections, but that three in particular weren’t enforced, which I call the 3 Unenforced Minimum Requirements for liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security. They are
- The consent of the governed
- That no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law
- Property rights as understood by the framers, ratifiers, and public including that you can’t make property from nature unless you leave enough as good in common for others
Today is our third such struggle, as revealed by Our Collective Problems. Again, the problem today isn’t a faulty constitution but not enforcing the 3 Unenforced Minimum Requirements.
Pollution and depletion violate all three of them. To be clear: enforcing the minimum requirements requires zero pollution and depletion. Our culture teaches us to recoil at the prospect. It seems impossible and crazy, like reverting to the Stone Age and all those legitimizing myths.
Balance and compromise sound nice and more palatable. Sure, we want cleaner air, but also to fly to the Eiffel Tower and our aunt’s funeral. But balance and compromise also sounded nice and palatable with those other violations of these minimum requirements such as slavery. Those compromises appeared in the Declaration, Constitution, and countless political compromises that only made the Civil War bigger and inevitable.
Zero violations of the minimum requirements was practical and pragmatic. Nobody wants to restore slavery, with rare exception. We recoil in horror that they continued violating their values so long.
I will mention Step 5 of my project before steps 1 through 4. I will lose many of you if I haven’t already, since I’m not marketing a product or technology, but Columbia Business School teaches relevant leadership better than any school I know of and that leadership is what I’m promoting.
Step 5 is for the US to enforce the 3 Unenforced Minimum Requirements, which means zero pollution or depletion, which means zero extraction or importation of fossil fuels or uranium. The alternative is not business as usual. I’m not trying to protect the planet or the environment in the abstract. I’m protecting liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security from the outcomes history has shown result otherwise: tyranny, civil war, and invasion, preceded by civic breakdown.
As with slavery, pollution and depletion grow without bound. We can’t contain them. Only zero is practical and pragmatic, even if it feels as unimaginable to us today as zero felt in 1865 before the thirteenth amendment.
Effective sales includes handling objections. I know that I raised many with you which seem so insurmountable and conclusive that you may well think I’m ignorant, crazy, or stupid. I felt every one of those objections and have heard them voiced over more than a decade.
The reasons for the experiments wasn’t for my health. They were to validate those objections so I could stop. Changing culture is hard, even to restore values people want restored—actually especially to restore values people have been violating. My life would be a lot easier not trying to change culture, even to enforce our own Declaration and Constitution. I don’t want to waste my time. I’ve been trying to prove that zero wouldn’t work or even wouldn’t be rewarding. We admire Abraham Lincoln but we don’t want to live his life.
So far, hands-on practical experience has shown zero pollution and depletion, contrary to all expectations and cultural beliefs, as practical, pragmatic, and desirable as zero slavery, just incredibly hard to imagine to people steeped in millennia-old legitimizing myths, however false.
It’s actually fun.
Step 6 is a liberated market—liberated from coercions and violations of those minimum requirements. We’ll see a blossoming of innovation, just ones that don’t violate the consent of the governed or deprive people of life, liberty, and property. Isn’t that what we want, more than innovation that violates those things? First there would be a reconstruction.
Steps 1 through 4 start from you and me, here and now, leading to the overwhelming popular support necessary for the government to act. Generally they involve a mindset shift followed by a process of continual improvement, then building community.
My vision is a world free of Our Collective Problems. Not peace on earth or an end to all suffering, but not driving each other to outcomes nobody wants, blaming others for what we’re all collectively doing.
The work to get there is rewarding and, yes, even fun.