The Seneca Collapse of the US Senate

The triumph gobbledigook-based politics

The Goddess Gaia teaches system dynamics to the creatures of the forest.

You know that a “Seneca Curve” is the graphic embodiment of the Seneca Effect, which says that growth is slow, but ruin is rapid. The concept comes from a statement by the Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca during the 1st century AD. It is a fascinating facet of the behavior of complex systems, one which highlights how the universe works: never smoothly growing or declining, but always going up and down in ripples. And the “down” part is often faster than the “up” one.

I often scour the Web to find examples, and I am surprised to see how universal the Seneca Curve is. This time, I was truly startled by one example published by Stephan Lewandowsky and his coworkers. You can also read about it in a Substack post by Joachim Clement.

What are we seeing here? It is the “Evidence Measurement Index” (EMI) of a corpus of speeches in the US Senate over more than a century. Lewandowsky and his colleagues measured the “evidence” content of Senators’ speeches. The procedure is quite complex, but it is mostly a quantification of what the human mind can do: understanding whether a statement is based on facts or fantasies. Klement reports two examples from the paper, but let me report another example, not from the Senate, but from a political debate anyway. It is from the debate of Sarah Palin and Joe Biden in 2008, when they were vice-presidential candidates. Regarding Energy, Biden was factual.

Now, let’s look at the facts. We have 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We consume 25 percent of the oil in the world. John McCain has voted 20 times in the last decade-and-a-half against funding alternative energy sources, clean energy sources, wind, solar, biofuels. The way in which we can stop the greenhouse gases from emitting.

while Palin was all about emotion.

The chant is ‘drill, baby, drill.’ And that’s what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into. They know that even in my own energy-producing state we have billions of barrels of oil and hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean, green natural gas.

In this case, Biden won, but it is impressive how Sarah Palin could mount a case for drilling more fossil fuels in terms of people “chanting drill, baby, drill.” But it is what happened in US politics during the past half century.

What transformed the US Senators into word-salad machines? Lewandowsky et al. noted a correspondence between the decline of factual speech and the increasing inequality in the US, a trend that started in the early 1970s.

But why this correlation? The authors of the paper seem to think that emotional political speeches lead to inequality. They say, “EMI precedes shifts in income inequality, such that a stronger emphasis on evidence-based reasoning is associated with subsequent reduction in income inequality whereas greater reliance on intuition seems to be associated with the persistence of existing social disparities.” Which I find a little hard to accept. It is more likely that both gobbledigook and inequality go in step, although a little out of sync with each other, both pushed onward by something else.

Let me propose an explanation of the Gobbledigook triumph in the Senate’s speeches based on a qualitative interpretation of system dynamics. I don’t claim to be perfectly right, but at least I believe I can provide some food for thought.

It starts with the underlying reason for the increase in inequality in the US, which can be found in the “Hubbert Peak” of the US oil production in 1970. From that moment up to recent times, the US ceased to be a net exporter of oil and became a net importer. That was a cost that wasn’t there before, and someone had to pay for it. As usual, when there is something to pay, the rich tend to pass the bill to the poor, and the result is increasing inequality. The poor are not happy, and, therefore, the rich have to convince them that they are doing them a favor. All over the world, politicians know very well how to use emotional banter to confuse people. It works, and the Western propaganda machine is today one of the world’s wonders. It all started in the early 1970s, and it is still ongoing, with the economic machine called “society” becoming more and more expensive to run, and with the poor becoming more and more destitute and emarginated.

This is a simplified explanation, but I think it is the backbone of the story. Then, there is much more, as obvious. The late 1960s and 1970s were a period of intense intellectual activity in the West, with a group of smart and highly prepared people questioning the very basis of the prosperity that the West had enjoyed up to then. You remember “The Limits to Growth” (1972) by a group of MIT scientists, “Silent Spring” (1968) by Rachel Carson, “The Population Bomb” (1968) by Paul Ehrlich, and many others. It was a period in which cutting down on resource consumption and stabilizing the world’s population were seriously considered and discussed.

As it happens in all complex systems, every action in a certain direction generates a resistance that goes in the opposite direction. We don’t need to assume that a group of evil conspirers collected in a smoke-filled basement to plan a strategy to put down those subversives (although we know that the US chemical industry did exactly that with Rachel Carson’s work). But surely there were powerful economic and social forces which would have been damaged by the kind of reforms that the intellectuals of the time were proposing. The consequence was obvious. The political game has its rules and if you can’t win a debate using facts, then you have to rely on emotions.

It worked: the movement of ideas associated with concepts such as peak oil, resource depletion, pollution, overpopulation, and other similar ones was thoroughly discredited and demonized. It was a slow process but, today, these concepts are unspeakable and unthinkable, unless mentioned to insult their original propesers.

It was a bit overdone, I’d say. If the trend continues, in a few decades, Senate speeches will be pure borborygmus (but maybe they already are). And not only the Senate, which is little more than a reflection of the general political trends in the West. Currently, the debate is thoroughly de-factualized, and nobody seems to think that it is a bad thing.

But that’s the way complex systems work: they are a tangle of feedbacks. Different elements of the system mirror each other, and you never know what is causing what. The Seneca Effect is the result of a forcing causing a feedback cascade that brings the system down. So it moves the Universe, and some old things must be wiped out to make space for new ones.