# 7 Rungs of a Runaway System ```plaintext ┌─────────────────────────────────────┐ LEVERAGE ↑ │ 7 BIOLOGY (fixed, ghost) │ SPEED ↓ ├─────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 6 WORLDVIEW │ ├─────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 5 VALUES & STATUS SIGNALS │ ├─────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 4 RULES & INSTITUTIONS │ ├─────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 3 INCENTIVES │ ├─────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 2 INFORMATION │ ├─────────────────────────────────────┤ │ 1 EVENTS & BEHAVIOUR │ └─────────────────────────────────────┘ ▲▲▲ all attention here ▲▲▲ ``` Source: *The Great Simplification* with Nate Hagens — "7 Rungs of a Runaway System: How Civilization Descended Into Crisis", 16 Oct 2026. [Podcast episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens/id1604218333?i=1000796651134&r=1691) A political-science-informed "behavioural ladder" explaining why fifty years of better science on energy and ecology has produced more emissions and more consumption rather than change. The core claim: the information deficit model ("people just need better information") is wrong, because information sits on one of the *lowest*, least powerful rungs of the ladder. What we attend to daily is the output of structures stacked above it. **A note on the count:** Hagens presents **six rungs**, then reveals a hidden seventh above them. The title's "7" counts biology, which sat invisibly above the ladder the whole time. ## The shape of the ladder Two arrows run up the sides: **leverage for change rises as you climb**, while **speed of change falls**. The rungs that are easiest and fastest to act on matter the least; the rungs that matter most move slowest. Our attention is saturated exactly where leverage is smallest. This is Hagens' variation on Donella Meadows' leverage points work and the systems thinkers' iceberg model (events on the surface, structures and mental models below). Nobody profits from working at the top: no one gets paid or elected on generational timescales, so "the leverage is upstream, the attention is downstream." Reading from the top down: ## Rung 7 (above the ladder): Biology Ancient reward circuits: dopamine tuned to novelty and unexpected reward, relative status mattering more than absolute wellbeing, steep discounting of the future, and the tendency of all organisms to use available energy. This rung differs from every other in exactly one way: **it cannot be changed**. It touches every rung below it, which is why status has such staying power, political discounting is so steep, and attention is so easily captured. The caveat, via [[Christopher Boehm]] (see [[Hierarchy in the Forest]]): biology is fixed, but *how it manifests is not*. We carry both the status-climbing drive and an anti-dominance instinct, the coalition behaviour that kept would-be alphas in check for hundreds of thousands of years. Which gets expressed is decided by the rungs below. So the rung is fixed but not singular. This is Hagens' amendment to the leverage-points literature: since changing human nature is off the table, the highest workable leverage is **redirecting** it — re-aiming the status drive at different targets. ## Rung 6: Worldview The deepest changeable layer: shared, mostly invisible assumptions about how the world works. Humans are separate from and above nature; more is better; growth is the normal state of the world. Hagens' own concept of **energy blindness** lives here — treating energy as one commodity among many, a line item, rather than the thing that makes every other line item possible. Worldviews are invisible to those who hold them, which is why they are so hard to change. Most people never experience theirs as a choice; the cultural worldview is shaped by the inertia of the majority view of a generation ago, and shifts suddenly only after system-level shocks (depression, world war). *The gallon of petrol:* one gallon does roughly five weeks of hard human labour, but the dominant worldview prices it like a gallon of milk — simple to produce, simple to replace. Energy blindness in a single price comparison. ## Rung 5: Values and status signals Humans are social copying machines: we imitate what we see others admired for, which is how worldviews get enforced without anyone acting as enforcer. Today's cultural scoreboard tracks consumption and display — square footage, follower counts, brand clothes, the flashy boat, the exotic holiday. The hopeful part: these scoreboards have flipped before, and the mechanism is consistent — **elites defect first**, and society copies. Foot binding in China collapsed in about thirty years after a thousand years, because elite families pledged not to bind daughters' feet or marry sons to women with bound feet. Dueling, fur, and smoking went from glamorous to disapproved within a generation the same way. Very few people change because they were convinced by an argument; they change because people with status changed first. *The gallon of petrol:* America's best-selling vehicle has been a full-size pickup truck for over four decades — the scoreboard routes status through 400 horsepower and lots of gasoline. But scoreboards can be rerouted, which makes this arguably the pivotal rung. ## Rung 4: Rules and institutions Where values get turned into law: constitutions, property rights, accounting standards, security doctrines. Rules are **value judgments frozen in time**, outliving the people and circumstances that froze them. Example: fiduciary duty binds a fund manager to maximise financial returns whatever her personal views about the world her grandchildren inherit — she executes a decades-old value judgment and faces lawsuits for deviating from it. The big insight came from economists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, *The Calculus of Consent* (1962), the founding text of public choice theory (see [[Democracy in Chains]] for the critical history of Buchanan's project): the person at the ballot box, the government desk and the cash register are the same creature. Nobody grows a halo on entering public office. So when markets fail and the reflex is "government should step in" — government fails too, in its own predictable ways, because it is made of the same people under the same pressures. ## Rung 3: Incentives The gradients the rules create: prices, subsidies, quarterly earnings, career ladders, election cycles — the strategies that let individuals survive and thrive within the system. Three things do most of the harm here: 1. **Who shows up.** A small group with millions at stake per member will always out-organise a huge group with £10 at stake per member, because organising is costly and only the concentrated side can afford it. The carbon pulse is the extreme case: benefits of burning ancient sunlight are organised and delivered to the present; costs land on the global poor, other species, and the unborn, who have no votes and fund no super PACs. The meadow in your community has no lobbyist, and neither do orangutans. 2. **Where talent migrates.** Tullock's rent-seeking: past a point, more money and brainpower go to fighting over the pie than to baking a better or bigger one. Hagens expects this to intensify as net energy per capita plateaus, shifting effort from creating surplus to fighting over existing claims. 3. **The clock.** Election horizons run two to six years — political discounting is steeper even than financial discounting, and no election cycle is longer than the ecological processes that matter most. *The gallon of petrol:* any politician presiding over rising pump prices loses, full stop — so reserves get managed on election timelines rather than emergency ones. The crucial point: **nobody in this has to be a bad person**. Everyone responding rationally to their local gradient is enough to lock in the collective outcome. This is the superorganism argument arrived at from individual incentives rather than from emergence in nature. ## Rung 2: Information What gets measured gets managed; what isn't measured doesn't exist to the system. GDP and stock prices are reported nightly everywhere; planetary boundaries have never once led a news broadcast — an asymmetry decided by the rungs above, not by any news editor. [[Simon Kuznets]] built the national income accounts for the US Congress in the 1930s and warned in his own report that a nation's welfare cannot be inferred from its national income; the designer of the metric flagged its misuse in advance and was ignored. The same school named the demand-side problem **rational ignorance**: your single vote almost never decides anything, so becoming deeply informed costs more than the payoff — staying uninformed is the individually rational move. So information fails twice: filtered on the supply side by the incentives above it, unwanted on the demand side by rationally ignorant audiences. This is the answer to the opening question: even true, careful, well-communicated information arrives only on one of the lowest rungs. *The gallon of petrol:* pump prices are posted in illuminated numbers several feet tall, updated daily; the wide-boundary costs appear only as asterisks in appendices, and never in the national accounts Kuznets built. ## Rung 1: Events and behaviour The bottom rung: daily news, elections, market moves, conflicts, product launches, outrage cycles. Nearly all public attention lives here, and it is refreshed every morning by design. Hagens' ranking of what society prioritises — AI, military, currency, bonds, energy, citizen wellbeing, environmental health, roughly in that order — felt terrible, but is nobody's single day's decision: it is the output of the five rungs above, re-imprinted on society fresh each morning. *The gallon of petrol:* by the time you turn the ignition key on your commute, most of the choosing was already done rungs ago — by zoning, the tax code, the pump price, the truck in the driveway. ## The conclusion, and the trap The obvious conclusion — work at the top, change the worldview, that's where the leverage is — is sharpened by the attention economy, which has made the bottom rung a business model engineered to hold eyeballs. And the top rung moves over decades or longer. A practical use: for any article, argument, organisation or project, ask **which rung is this operating on and trying to change?** ## People mentioned - **Nate Hagens** — host of *The Great Simplification*; energy and ecological overshoot, "energy blindness", the superorganism. Mentioned in [[I Eat the Stars]]. - **James Buchanan** & **Gordon Tullock** — *The Calculus of Consent* (1962), public choice theory. Buchanan's later career is covered critically in [[Democracy in Chains]]. - **Greg Elliott** — recent TGS guest; observation that the economic system, if it were a person, would share traits with a psychopath. - **Donella Meadows** — leverage points in systems; the iceberg model lineage. Mentioned in [[new mental models]] but no dedicated note yet. - **Johan Rockström** — planetary boundaries science, cited as one of the few sources that reaches the information rung. - **Simon Kuznets** — architect of GDP's national accounts → [[Simon Kuznets]]. - **Christopher Boehm** — anti-dominance / reverse dominance hierarchy → [[Christopher Boehm]], [[Hierarchy in the Forest]]. ## Suggested new notes (well aligned with the vault) - **Nate Hagens** (👥 People) — energy blindness, the superorganism, The Great Simplification; links to [[Peter Turchin]] (also a TGS guest, see [[Immiseration]]) and [[I Eat the Stars]]. - **Donella Meadows** (👥 People) and/or **Leverage Points** (📚 Topics) — her framework is already referenced in [[new mental models]] and [[Rupert Reed]] and is the direct ancestor of this ladder. - **Public Choice Theory** (📚 Topics/Economics) — Buchanan and Tullock; would link [[Democracy in Chains]], [[Democracy]], [[Bureaucracy]]. - **Johan Rockström / Planetary Boundaries** (👥 People / 📚 Topics/Science) — pairs with the NEB material and climate work. - **Energy Blindness** or **The Superorganism** (📚 Topics/Economics or Sociology) — Hagens' core concepts; natural companions to [[Tragedy of The Commons]]. - **Status Signals** (📚 Topics/Sociology) — elite defection and scoreboard flips; would sit well beside [[Habitus]], [[Cultural Hegemony]] and [[Status]]. ## Related notes [[Habitus]] · [[Cultural Hegemony]] · [[Resources/📚 Topics/🌍 Sociology/Culture]] · [[Democracy]] · [[Bureaucracy]] · [[Tragedy of The Commons]] · [[Social Media]] · [[Media]] · [[Theory of Change]] · [[Gangs & Corporations]] · [[Immiseration]] · [[Rat Utopia]] · [[I Eat the Stars]] · [[new mental models]]