Why are we miserable?

Napoleon thought that the main purpose of religion was to stop the poor from slaughtering the rich. At the start of the 20^th century around 95% of Australians identified themselves as religious. This has been declining at around 3% per decade ever since, so that 110 years later about 1/3 are god believers, about 1/3 are not and the last 1/3 seem not interested.

People in Australia might not be full of joy, but so far there have been no campaigns to slaughter the rich or even to tax them more, apart from the mining industry. So presumably relief from religion has not resurrected pogroms against the rich.

Is it this decline in religion that is correlated with a feeling of malaise, despair and in some sectors, anger? Is it a result of the "keep them dumb, make them angry" campaign waged by a large section of the media to sell papers and TV shows by pandering to the pessimists and depressed?

Australia is doing economically very well compared to nearly all other countries. We have an abundance of cheap manufactured goods from simple tools to the most sophisticated cars, IT gadgets delivered at low cost and good quality courtesy of the work ethic in China and Asia, and an abundance of aluminium, iron, copper and coal under our feet. We are not yet grossly overpopulated with space to move and escape and are relatively free from ethnic, religious and resource restrictions that plague so many other countries. Even the issue guaranteed to excite most emotion like the "boat people," is very minor compared to that experienced by countries all around the world.

All things are relative and this is especially true of human emotions. We are happy, angry or content basically by comparison to, and comparing ourselves with, others. Envy, the neutrino emotion, as it likes to stay undetected but can travel faster than light, is the major driver of the happy/misery index and envy is most powerful when local. That is, what is happening to people in Europe, Asia or the Americas is of much less importance, no matter how extreme their comparative position, than minor perceived differences in status, wealth and income of people in your suburb. Australians are still relatively homogeneous in their suburbs, but less so, and maybe envy is a factor but probably only a minor one.

So, what is driving the discontent in Australia? Is it the hollowing out of the middle class, which is proceeding apace in the USA and no doubt is a major factor in the rise of the Tea Party and now the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Certainly a secure, relatively large middle class with good prospects is the dominant determinant of a country's stability and general feeling of wellbeing. The poor need to feel they can progress into the middle class and the middle class, which is the one that is used to compromising due to constraints, will be positive and well behaved if general advancement and security in old age are not seen to be under threat. In Australia, this is still a reasonable belief, even if the top level are demanding and getting absurdly high salaries.

Perhaps another factor is demographic. As humans age they generally become less optimistic, enthusiastic and hopeful about life and the average age in Australia is slowly increasing. This may be a consideration but, apart from the tendency to obesity which seems to have flattened out so to speak, the elderly are more wealthy and in better health than ever.

Human angst, of an ill defined but persistent variety, surfaces when challenges to belief systems arise. Examples of this are abundant in the history of the cultural/religious variety, as illustrated by the Copernican and Darwinian initiated revolutions. The angst will be maximised when the challenge is not only to a belief system but also has direct consequences for how we live. After all, realising that the earth went around the sun rather than the reverse only required a very tiny minority or people, such as astronomers and navigators, to make adjustments to their work. It was a challenge to the existing paradigm but not one that required people to behave differently.

We are currently in the midst of a paradigm shift that affects not only our belief system but also how we live. There is no doubt that the truth will set you free, but the process of arriving at that truth and then taking responsibility for accepting the truth can be a very stressful journey and Australians are just starting this journey.

It is clear that the size and extent of global energy use, which has provided the sub structure for the huge world population and for the high material living standards of maybe 20%, cannot continue as it cannot deliver comparable living standards to the other 80%, or advance or even retain the standards of the privileged 20%.

The depletion of resources, the destruction of the complex biological environment and its inhabitants and the altering of the dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans are now well established. But this knowledge directly conflicts with existing economic, and in some cases religious, beliefs. It is clear that the long accepted, indeed almost canonical ideas, about limitless growth, infinite resources and unlimited human ingenuity, have some rather unpleasant oscillations which has underpinned the wealth of societies and individuals, and are no longer tenable.

Australia as one of the privileged societies with abundant energy resources and high use at low efficiency is at the forefront of this challenge to a deeply ingrained belief system. We are still in the stressful, non-decisive stage where the old beliefs are strong in some quarters, the new ideas still to be fully developed and digested and the required changes to lifestyle seen more for the disruption and inconvenience that will follow, rather than for the benefits that can accrue.

The angst arising thereof will not be dissipated and replaced with a positive, optimistic outlook until the new belief system can be soundly established and accepted as normal and natural.

It is no use replacing the old economic belief system and structures with another one that incorporates the same seeds of destruction. Religious arguments can persist for millennia as they are effectively circular, not amenable to empirical proof and have a rigidity that results from acquiring dogmatic knowledge at an early age. The world has seen that the best way out of the circularity of such arguments is to dispense with them altogether and to replace them with a system that is capable of flexibility and incremental steps towards matching belief with reality.

Economic beliefs have persisted in a similar ideological way, as there has been no way to evaluate economic ideas other than from within the system. So the old arguments that have been formalised since the 1800s are still argued today and when resonant and implemented too literally, generate immense harm and distress.

The main economic beliefs are ultimately based on simplified models of human behaviour and which particular set of emotions and type of rationality is considered to drive that behaviour. If the individual profit maximising emotion is selected we end up with cycles of bubbles and depressions. Alternatively, if the motive of the altruistic group benefit maximiser is accepted, then society heads towards stagnation and often xenophobia.

The way ahead is to move economics, in the macro sense, from this basis and put it on a physical one. The world is such a wonderful place because we have had over 3 billion years of the most primitive life forms taking energy from the sun and changing the atmosphere into a stable, oxygen rich one with very effective feedback mechanisms that keep the system stable.

Our economic system must do likewise, otherwise the so called most advanced life form on the planet will wreck, in a few hundred years, all the good work done by the least advanced over the last 3 billion years.

To do this, the economic system must be based on and measured by the use of energy and the production of entropy as an empirical quantification of which system should be adopted. This is the only way to move economic systems, and thus how humans live in and utilise the world's resources, out of archaic beliefs based on concepts and then onto a rational level.

This is well within existing capabilities although only dimly perceived at present and well outside the limits of this essay. But once this journey is started, the cloud of gloom will dissipate as the challenge becomes based on how best to realise the future. The depressive and divisive arguments over past beliefs and who was responsible will fade into irrelevance just like the few flat earth believers left and the noisy but ineffectual antievolution brigades.