The Golden Egg Dilemma

Every society that expands ultimately reaches a point where the government feels that they cannot afford to not destroy the environment. Following Aesop’s famous fable about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, I call this the golden egg dilemma.

Here is how it works. When societies discover new resources that are relatively easy to exploit, such as irrigation (the Sumerians), wealthy neighbours who could be easily conquered (the Roman Empire), land (the American West) and oil (our global civilisation), the societies expand in both population and complexity. The role of government itself expands by providing schools, hospitals, large-scale transportation systems, police, research institutions and layers of supporting administrative structure. These institutions meet real social needs. The society comes to depend upon them to keep going.

However, there is an inevitable shift from easy expansion to increasing resource constraints. Fisheries become overfished, forests decline, topsoil is lost and irrigated lands become salty.

When resource constraints begin to be felt, the leadership typically responds by escalating the processes that are drawing down their resources. They push harder to squeeze out more. They do this because they need the immediate income. Without that income, at any given point in time, social institutions that the society has come to rely upon will not be able to be maintained. Therefore the leadership continuously ‘makes choices against the environment’, one seemingly small step at a time.

It is important to note that this is not fundamentally a matter of greed, although mendacious commercial interests may play their part. It is a matter of keeping the society going. Nevertheless, as we know the deterioration adds up.

This situation is the golden egg dilemma. There is a direct conflict between preserving the environment on the one hand and the government's (and society’s) need to maintain operating cash flow to keep society’s institutions going on the other.

The golden egg dilemma is a social dilemma. In our time it has to do with expectations of continuous growth, the need to pay off debt, psychological attachment to perceive comforts and privileges, innovative thinking or the lack of it, and difficulty imagining downshifting a whole society.

Thinking skills

The governing elite are skilled at planning for ever-increasing expansion. In contrast, little thought is given to planning for a slower, sustainable society. Therefore the governing elite has not developed the thinking skills necessary to make the real shifts required to become ecologically sustainable. They are highly intelligent, but since they lack the requisite thinking skills in this area, naturally they do more of what they already know how to do. So they persevere into a self-defeating spiral that in the past has led to the collapse of the numerous societies.

Anthropologist Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) explores the dynamics of a large number of quite different societies (Mayans, Sumerians, the Roman Empire, the Anasazi in the United States, and others) who have collapsed in this way. The golden egg dilemma quickly turns into a destroy-to-survive dynamic.

Societies that changed

There are a few societies where the leadership changed their fate for the better. In Collapse Jared Diamond describes how in the 1600s the leadership of Japan prevented an incipient ecological collapse by rigorously enforcing a ban on using forest products. The associated cultural changes enabled Japan to recover and remain viable.

On a far smaller scale Diamond also cites a South Sea island where the chiefs sacrificed their prized pigs because the pigs and gardens were in competition. Diamond contrasts this with the Norse Greenlanders who were unable to sacrifice their prized cows (and make other necessary adaptations), and consequently starved to death.

Tainter describes how the Byzantine Empire shifted from maintaining a standing army that was supported by the rest of the population to a distributed army where the soldiers were given land and produced their own sustenance. This was a major innovation that stopped the economic drain that would have destroyed the empire.

Regretfully, given the immediacy of global warming effects, our global civilisation is now poised for ecological collapse, and it may be unstoppable. Global warming is accelerated by the industrial emissions that come with increasing economic growth.

Yet we see that in response to the global economic meltdown governments around the world are doing their best to restimulate economic growth. Like the leaders of numerous societies before us they are pushing the levers in the wrong direction. The destroy-to-survive dynamic is in full swing.

In contrast, outside the mainstream we already have the technical, social and psychological ingenuity to evolve an ecologically sustainable and socially healthy society that will be pleasurable to live in. In a democracy sustainable wellbeing needs become our common aspiration.

Bring the dilemma into public discussion

Therefore it is important to bring the golden egg dilemma into public discussion. We need to move beyond the simple polarities of economics versus the environment, and accept the common challenge of how to reorganise our aspirations and practice to become an ecologically viable and socially healthy society. It will take unprecedented ingenuity and social commitment that involves all of us.

Now we shift to the personal, since our lives are involved. I am committed to contributing to making this shift happen. I hope that through your own intelligence, wisdom and caring you will contribute to this as well.