The Rise of Social Inequality
10/12/22 • 51 min
Richard Heinberg, renowned energy and sustainability expert, explores the development of social power – simply defined as the ability to get other people to do something. Whether through money, violence, writing, or other means, humans have devised interesting ways of exerting influence over one another. One major downside, with implications for the collapse of societies, is widespread inequality. Concentration of social power tends to create social instability. You'll hear how power acts as a drug, damages people’s brains, and leads to the tragedies of slavery and colonization. Along the way, you might adopt new verbs like "Tom Sawyering" and "Robin Hooding." Note: Choral music in this episode was licensed from Allen Grey Music, "Lost Voices Soundscape." For more information, please visit our website.
Learn more at power.postcarbon.org
Richard Heinberg, renowned energy and sustainability expert, explores the development of social power – simply defined as the ability to get other people to do something. Whether through money, violence, writing, or other means, humans have devised interesting ways of exerting influence over one another. One major downside, with implications for the collapse of societies, is widespread inequality. Concentration of social power tends to create social instability. You'll hear how power acts as a drug, damages people’s brains, and leads to the tragedies of slavery and colonization. Along the way, you might adopt new verbs like "Tom Sawyering" and "Robin Hooding." Note: Choral music in this episode was licensed from Allen Grey Music, "Lost Voices Soundscape." For more information, please visit our website.
Learn more at power.postcarbon.org
Previous Episode
Fire, Tools, and Language
Join renowned energy and sustainability expert, Richard Heinberg, as he describes the flow of power in hunter-gatherer communities of the Pleistocene. As people learned to wield fire, deploy an array of tools, and coordinate actions through increasingly descriptive language, they became more capable of concentrating power. This development produced mind-blowing impacts on brain capacity and other aspects of human evolution. As you go back in time to the dawn of civilization, you'll become familiar with self-reinforcing feedback loops and how they shaped humanity's rise to dominance. And finally, you'll get to hear about (and appreciate) the surprising power of beauty in all its varied forms, but especially in the form of music. For more information, please visit our website.
Learn more at power.postcarbon.org
Next Episode
Fossil Fuels Changed Everything
Over the 19th and 20th centuries physical power, social power, and economies grew explosively. The main cause was humanity’s exploitation of fossil fuels. Sources of oil, coal, and natural gas – a vast underground storehouse of ancient sunlight – provided an almost magical and seemingly unlimited supply of energy to grow more food, provision more people, build more cities, and create more technologies. But this age of "more" also brought global warfare, consumerism, and overproduction. Improve your energy literacy with stories about pushing motor vehicles, enduring blackouts, and growing $10 tomatoes, and take a tour of history that visits ancient China, industrializing Britain, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the Green Revolution. Resources mentioned in this episode include a juxtaposition of old and new city photographs, and Jason Bradford’s report The Future Is Rural. The song, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" was written by lyricist Yip Harburg and composer Jay Gorney. For more information, please visit our website.
Learn more at power.postcarbon.org
Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival - The Rise of Social Inequality
Transcript
Melody Travers
Welcome to Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. In this series, we explore the hidden driver behind the crises that are upending societies and disrupting the life support systems of the planet. That hidden driver is power, our pursuit of it, or overuse of it, and our abuse of it. I'm your host Melody Travers.
Rob Dietz
And I'm Rob Dietz, your copilot and Program Director at Post Carbon Institute. Join us as we explore power and why giving it up just might s
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