Nominalism as a change point for climate?

What if nominalism is the key inhibitor to changing our cultural footing to work on our global carbon dioxide problem?

Ever hear of nominalism? The over-simplified version of it is that “only objects exist.” If you can’t touch it, it’s not real.

Think this sounds familiar? You’re not wrong. It’s part of Taxonomies of process. Pop over there to read a hypothesis of nominalism affecting thought work, e.g., design.

I think business might be steeped in nominalism.

It took me reading about 5 variations of it to be convinced that this concept was the one underlying why there was cognitive dissonance around information technology in the 1990’s.

How could anyone sell what couldn’t be touched? How to quantify something that had no tangible presence to impact the world? Heads got wrapped around it, but I think it was often by transferring that presence to some quantifiable dimension. Hardware got traction before software. Software had to first adhere to single-point-exchange models and hope the profits would last until the next version could be released.

So how can a nominalist mindset quantify the intellectual efforts that live beyond the formation of pixels that somehow apply to the concrete?

Let that swirl around your brain for a while. You’re an industrial baker, intent on selling x number of cookies…but instead you have ways to unhinge the production of cookies from the physical components that, without touching a single pound of butter, increases the quantity of cookies — yay, more cookies. Yet, without touching a single physical object involved at any point with the cookie, you are still expected to pay for it. Buuuuttt…cookies.

Oh, numbers. Numbers you understand. Numbers are what you’ve been working with all these years. The number of people needed to make the cookies, the number weight of a number of ingredients, the numbers of machines to process, the number of cookies available, the number of transportation to get the cookies from production to a number of outlets, and finally a number of bellies. Increase these numbers in step — scale — to increase profit.

When it comes to thought work, the product is intangible. The work isn’t seen as the work, the outcome is. Be right, be first, be done. But neither, really, is the outcome seen as the work, because the nominalist mind does understand that an outcome can’t burst fully fledged from your brain like Athena from Zeus. They understand that people and hours and materials and tools are all necessary to produce a something to sell.

In other words, the nominalist building a profit base will find a thing to quantify: number of screen designed, understanding to automate, lines of code, etc. They’ve made the leap into abstract information, but with pulling along their physical resource allocation models.

Those physical resource allocation models say that one tree is one tree. One tree can be turned into x planks, x reams of paper, or x yards of fabric — but they can’t be the full amount of all of them all at once. What starts as one tree is processed into a smaller-weight-total set of outputs (because of material lost during processing), which will produce x profit. Scale to trees, manage the counts of supporting tools and efforts needed to scale.

The hypothesis: nominalist view of climate impact

So how can the nominalist lens create business profit in a world where the consumption of a number of items is no longer the rational means of valuation?

It can’t. It would swing into denial, double-down on what it knows, and press forward. It might look like gaslighting, but from inside it’s working to simplify a cognitive dissonance.

If we want to live sustainably and reduce our carbon footprint, we need to do things like:

• Reduce consumption overall — how can I make a profit if I can’t increase the numbers sold?
• Reuse what already exists — how can I make a profit if I can’t increase the numbers sold?
• Actively participate in a circular economy — how can I make a profit if I can’t increase the numbers sold?
• Find ways to extend the lifespan and build in an ability to update what we do produce — but planned obsolensence increases the numbers sold, how can I make a profit?
• Research, implement, and refine ways to mitigate the carbon footprint in every step of production — but that eats into the counted production base, which means I’ll have to increase prices to maintain profit, but profit is based on the number sold and a higher price will reduce sales, how can I make a profit if I can’t increase the numbers sold?
• Fund ways to remove carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, measure it, and verify it— this just moves the expense to after profit has been realized, which means I have to scale production — more numbers! — to meet the anticipated expense and maintain my profit base, how can that possibly work in a reduce/reuse/recycle economy OR with rising costs affecting sales?

Matrix of object production options with the carbon footprint why, and what the nominalist dissonance would be.

Which means in all of these scenarios, the nominalist-minded businesses will carve out expenses wherever possible: tighter supply chain, cheaper transportation, reduced employee headcount, stifle employee compensation, faster production, etc.

Except all these options are already in play. Profit is being extracted as elegantly as possible, with any future increases predicated on better information and interpretation, i.e., automation. Which means, on a purely numbers basis with profit as the defining success metric, business would need to turn to people as the easiest point of impact: reduce headcount, reduce wages, increase productivity.

A year ago, I looked at the puzzle pieces of our cultural narrative of how to build a ‘good life’, and compared income and key expensese between 1985 (extent of median income data) and 2020. The median wage has not kept up with the increase in key narrative expenses. Overall, the change is a 6.61x increase to these expenses, with a 1.24x increase to the median income. More work isn’t enough to make up that gap to make a ‘good life’. The puzzle pieces of a life are 5.32x higher than the increased wages.

A diagram with a person working (hard, more, smart) with stagnant income since the 1980’s, and choosing what’s important from a ‘good life’ list that has: education, family, house, health, transportation, retirement, and how much each has gone up as a factor against income increase.

All this points to the idea that we’ve hit the outer boundaries of using nominalism as a business model.

I like people. I like this planet. I know not all of us are full of integrity and empathy; I know that there are people who use and downtrod others with solipsism and even glee. I don’t believe that’s the majority of us. I think the majority of the decisions that lead us here were built on urgency and desire, two of the biggest emotions that can put blinders on our perception.

The easiest holistic way out of this conundrum is also the hardest on an individual mind: change the metric of value. The single most shared core precept of how business is done is to increase the number of units sold to increase profit, and we have to change it. That breaks a deeply ingrained habit of thought.

Actually, it’s even worse: we have to shift how we think of one metric (profit) while adding other valuations to it so starvation and homelessness isn’t a (warning: dehumanized) “pain point” while our economy changes footing. That’s like changing a habit while adding new: brushing your teeth with a different pressure, while remembering to also using new-to-you hygiene tools, AND betting lives on it.

There is some implicit fear involved in all this urgency and desire to produce more, buy more, have more. I think we might see the ‘more’ as a bulwark against starvation and homelessness.

• The more we produce, the more we profit; the more profit we have on hand, the more troubles we can survive without a significant hiccup.
• If we buy more, we keep the movement of things, well, moving. That’s a key concept in a living, breathing economic system. If money doesn’t move — money currently predicated on exchange for objects (or the IP that helps to produce/move objects) — people can’t pay for food and shelter.
• If we have, we can sell to supplant funds needed for food and shelter (but only if there is a circular economy — which isn’t really working in the US). In the absence of money, in the support of a nominalism-functioning economy, having is the last moat before personal destruction.

This is only talking about profit, with a very narrow view. People are complex. We make what we make for so very many reasons, and not everyone is focused on profit as the single defining quality of a job well done — or even the reason for doing a job (I’m not getting paid for this thought work and writing). Money itself is still relevant unless a person is fully self sufficient, with their shelter fully owned and food they don’t have to buy. That isn’t many. Most of us need the movement of money to ensure our continued existence.

Which means, in a world that needs to change footing to reduce/reuse/recycle, carbon footprint mitigation, and carbon dioxide removal, we need to figure out how to unhinge value from objects while still allowing for life, choice, and individual agency. Life, choice, and individual agency are key components to deeper understanding — like that the accumulation of greenhouse gases is why we are suffering heat waves, a novel hurricane on the North American West Coast, forest fires, and coral bleaching. Without it we keep on keeping on: nice if you have other things to worry about, not so nice if ignoring new understanding leads to the destruction of the planet’s current ecology, and humanity as a whole with it.

We don’t even need to start from scratch. The United Nations has researched and devised a blueprint with the Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG). It outlines what people need in the long term. Money is actually there, implicit in a small subset of the 17 points.