Breaking The Curse of Sisyphus: Action Bias

When civilisations fumble in the dark, the risk is not so much that they will lose their way. Rather, the danger is that they will retrace their mistakes – only this time using bigger, more devastating technologies.

Each year around May, my town’s not-so-bright mayor decides to spend an exorbitant amount of public money, labour, and fossil fuel in order to move hundreds of tons of sand from the east side of the beach to the west, after sea currents have carried it the opposite direction over the winter months. For three weeks each year, and right before the tourist stampede, the beach is invaded by massive industrial-size bulldozers that dig, shift, carry and re-deposit the sand that ignored all human instructions: it went the wrong way.

Over the winter months of course, the sand says “fuck off” to humanity again, and follows the more reliable path of physics instead: it follows the altered sea current that was strengthened by the disappearance of vegetation, funnelled via the building of marinas and hotels along the coast, and supercharged by the global sea level rise that has made me bear witness to several metres of beachfront disappearing over the course of my lifetime. Building over the creeks that used to feed the beach with sediment over millions of years was also not an incredibly smart move.

So actually, the sand does go where humans instructed it to go, it’s just that humans never know what they want, and definitely never realise what they wish for: human intervention on nature always has so many unintended consequences that, the safest course of action is to not intervene at all.

In 2023 (In The Grip of Necrocapitalism) I described humanity’s relationship with the planet as one of permanent war: a struggle not only against other life forms, but against the elements of the planet and the physics that determine where sand goes, how much CO2 we can pump into the atmosphere before Earth becomes uninhabitable, and how much of a rainforest we can cut down before it goes into reverse and becomes a carbon source. We are not simply pushing our luck. We are pushing an impossibly big rock up a hill. We are Sisyphus.

In the well-known ancient Greek myth, Sisyphus, who had pissed off the gods, is sentenced to the torture of having to push a huge rock up a mountain for the duration of eternity. Each time he comes within metres of the top of the mountain, the rock rolls all the way back down and Sisyphus begins the gruelling task all over again. The Greeks had written the myth of Sisyphus’s punishment as a pagan lesson for those who defy Gods and the natural order of things. But in 1940, French philosopher Albert Camus gave the myth a much more existential, human-centric in my opinion, interpretation: he saw Sisyphus as a metaphor for the futility of human existence, and his personal ordeal as an ode to human resilience and “triumph” even within futile circumstances. Salary-controlled consumatronic humans today surely can relate to the Sisyphean lifestyle, which repeats like clockwork every 24 hours. But is this lifestyle a triumph? In his book The Myth of Sisyphus, a frankly unimaginative rip off on the title of the Greek ancient myth, Camus eventually concludes with his famous words: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”.

I agree. Happiness is not about making it to the top of the hill. But I also think that one must imagine Sisyphus hopelessly stupid, because he is also my town’s mayor. Anyone who repeats the same action a million times thinking they may get a different result is a waste of precious cranial space – whether they are eternally pushing a rock up a hill or moving sand from east to west. Like Sisyphus, and like my retarded mayor, humans are known to love torturing themselves. We always follow the unnatural path of most resistance: uphill.

What if we went with the tide for once? What if we listened to what the tide wants, and we aligned ourselves with it? What if we could come to a point where eventually, the tide is doing our work for us? This is how ecosystems work: organisms don’t have to cultivate their food, construct their own habitat, subjugate their own species and drive all others to extinction, like humans do. Support is there for them already, provided by the ecosystem and the natural forces of the planet. All we have to do is end our war with nature and trust that, as long as we provide for it, it will provide for us. The war with the planet must end. Humans must follow where the sand goes, not the other way round.

How can we rewrite the myth of Sisyphus? One must imagine Sisyphus neither happy nor retarded, but thinking, reassessing, rebelling: “what am I even doing here? What is the point? What if I stop pushing the rock up the mountain? What if I just don’t do anything? What if I just walk away? What will happen then?”

At the World Adaptation Forum last spring I talked specifically about action bias, a cognitive malfunction where one always automatically assumes that the solution to a problem is an “action”, when it may in fact be inaction. Tackling action bias, for me, should be the top priority in the intellectual bedrock of any degrowth movement.

In my talk back then, I spoke about action vs inaction, and how capitalism made action bias the default “solution” to everything:

Humans prefer action to inaction. Action makes us feel good, makes us look good to others, and gives us the sense that we are in control…our economic system is self-destructive because it only understands doing, building, and achieving. It is fundamentally incapable of reducing, reusing, pausing, and altogether stopping. Why? because these solutions, which are in fact the only solutions we have that are truly sustainable, are not monetizeable.

Earth does not need to be “saved”. Earth just needs to be left alone. We are trying to fix all the problems of capitalism with capitalism. This has never worked, and it never will. We are trying to fix ecosystems by managing them, creating green products that are anything but green, and building sustainable cities when we should be building no more cities.

In the same talk, I proposed embracing “targeted, thoughtful inaction”:

By contrast to the so-called benefits of action, the benefits of inaction are systemic, long-lasting, sustainable, and permanent. But they are not monetizable, because there is no actual transaction involved. There are no investors, no corporations, no technobroligarchs or Epstein Class involved. There are no buyers or sellers, because we are the buyer and the seller. And the benefits of inaction are spread equally amongst all humans, and all species. This is a type of transaction that defies capitalism.

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