The West Must Defeat Russia

Please note the title of this post.  Note that it is not in the passive voice, but the active voice.  Russia has launched repeated all-out assaults in an attempt to break Ukrainian defenses.  The latest assault is against the Ukrainian town of Soledar.  The Ukrainians have repeatedly proven time and time again that they are willing to fight with valor and determination against thuggish Russian aggression.  However, the West has repeatedly been somewhat timorous and restrained in supplying weapons to Ukraine in order that Ukraine might drive Russian thug invaders from its territory.  So the world has had to witness repeated cliffhangers in the story of Ukraine's fight to liberate itself.

This has got to stop.  I cannot believe that we in the West have allowed Russia's dangerous aggression to go on for so long!  The West must have the courage to do whatever it takes to swiftly destroy Russia's military power.  Those in the West who are afraid of what Russia might do if it is defied and confronted should rather consider what Russia will certainly do if it is allowed to win.  Narcissists, bullies and thugs always escalate when they are not soundly and effectively stopped at the first sign of aggression.  Appeasement never works.  We must ask ourselves whether the cowards among us are paving the way for a world in which we allow ourselves to be trashed by Russia.  Russia must be stopped dead in its tracks.  The West must at the very least send to Ukraine whaever weaponry it takes for Ukraine to drive Russian thugs out of its territory and keep them out.  Please write your Congressional representative or senator and write the President also to ask that the United States send whatever weaponry Ukraine needs - including both long-range missiles and heavy tanks - and that this military aid be sent swiftly.  

The Advance of Decompensation

A quick post tonight: there are two things worth mentioning.  First, Russian mercenaries claim to have captured the Ukrainian town of Soledar.  Yet these claims have turned out to be so far from reality that even the Kremlin has denied them.  Putin is perhaps discovering the weakness of relying on mercenaries to win an unrighteous war.  Russia is looking increasingly ill.

Second, the Republican members of the Missouri legislature have introduced legislation requiring women who attend legislative sessions to wear clothing that covers their arms.  These are the same Republicans who threw a wobbly when state health officials tried to impose mask mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19.  These are the same stupid people who applauded the stupid white males armed with assault rifles who stormed state houses in Midwest states with Democratic governors when those governors issued public health decrees that sought to keep these doofuses from getting sick and dying.  Evidently COVID was not as much of an existential threat as women with bare arms.

Both Putin, Russia, and the U.S. Republican Party are examples of people who are at war with reality.  Unfortunately for them, it's a war they're losing.

Precarity - An Introduction

Certain events from the past several weeks have provoked me to think about a topic which I have not studied in depth up to this time.  Those events are largely focused on the collapse of the cryptocurrency bubble last year and the corresponding destruction of the "investments" many poorer people made in "crypto" in order to increase their wealth.  (See "FTX Crypto Crash Threatens Life Savings of Working People", Truthout, November 2022, and "The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as Possible", Foreign Policy, May 2022.)  The collapse of economic bubbles in capitalist societies is a worthy topic of consideration in its own right  But my interest now lies in the motives and vulnerabilities of the ordinary people who were led to invest in "crypto" in the first place.  Their choice to invest was one of several coping mechanisms which they employed in order to try to deal with their social and economic situation.  That situation can be described by a single word: precarity.

Precarity is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse," and, "a situation in which someone's job or career is always in danger of being lost."  The Journal of Cultural Anthropology describes precarity as ". . . an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life . . . [It is] the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death."  The University of Georgia has an article on its "Neoliberalism Guide for Educators" webpage which describes precarity in concrete human terms, starting with the questions "Have you ever or do you currently live paycheck to paycheck?  Do you work 40 hours a week or more and still can't afford rent?"  We who live in the United States may be tempted to look on precarity solely in its American-style manifestations of inequality such as racism and the effects of tycoon capitalism, neoliberalism, privatization, and the destruction of social safety nets.  But precarity is a global phenomenon which can be seen even in ethnically homogeneous societies, as described by Hao Jingfang's "near science fiction" novelette titled, Folding Beijing.  (You can listen to an audio recording of her story at StarShipSofa.)  Precarity naturally arises whenever the people at the top of a society concentrate nearly all of the wealth of that society in the hands of a chosen few, thus creating a massive underclass out of the many who are not of the chosen few.  Those many become the precariat.

It is quite natural to assume that the precariat consist primarily of those historically marginalized populations without access to higher education, whose historical economic and social standing has condemned them to a blue-collar or manual labor or McJob sort of existence.  But while this is true, it is also true than an increasing number of white-collar, college-educated workers have found themselves forced into the precariat due to the destruction of long-standing arrangements between corporate masters and skilled professional labor.  For a recent example of this, consider the large number of lawyers who were laid off in 2022.  This progression of precarity among white-collar workers has been taking place for at least three decades.  (Four decades actually, if one counts the day that former President Ronald Reagan fired all of the air traffic controllers who were part of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration staff.)

Precarity is quite naturally a highly uncomfortable way of life.  This discomfort - frequently amounting to great pain and distress - quite naturally provokes a search for coping mechanisms from the people who comprise the precariat.  The usual suspects among coping mechanisms include things like the abuse of alcohol, opioids, and other drugs, or drowning oneself in other passive entertainments.  But my focus is on those more active attempts to cope which members of the precariat employ in trying to transform their situation.  So I am planning to write a series of posts on precarity, on the precariat, and on the attempts by members of the precariat to transform their situation.  A tentative outline of that series is as follows:

1. The Precariat - An Overview (This has been partly covered in today's post.)
2. My own experience of precarity
• As a teen
• As a college student
• Surprising encounters in the white-collar world
3. Origins and Spread of the Precariat
• The Link Between the Origins of Precarity and the Rise of Neoliberal (that is, radical libertarian free-market) capitalism
4. The Composition and Location of the Precariat
• Its global nature
• Its local expressions
5. The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat
• What Doesn't Work
• Unwise "Side Hustles"
• The False Promises of Bubbles
• The Role of the "Advice" (Motivational Speaking) Industry and "Influencer" Culture
• Political Dead-Ends
• What Does (or May) Work
6. The Precariat And the Great Resignation
7. Future Directions Of The Precariat
• As Passive Victims of Forces Outside Themselves
• As Active and Activized Agents Who Take Charge Of Their Own Future
• The Potential for Such Action
• The Possible Constraints Preventing Such Action
• The Precariat in "Babylon"

Each major heading in this list will be covered in a separate blog post.  Each major heading will also require some research in order to do it justice.  But fortunately, the extreme busyness which characterized my life during most of 2022 seems to be easing up.  (I have rediscovered the fact that sleeping, for instance, is delicious!  And I look forward to chillin' with my guitar in my backyard when the weather warms up . . . )  The time taken in researching each of these topics will be time well-spent, and hopefully it will prove useful to the readers of this blog, as I believe that an increasing number of us will be forced to deal with precarity (or even be swept involuntarily into the precariat) in the days to come.

Chastised By A Bursting Bubble

No, the burned hand teaches best.  After that,

advice about fire goes to the heart.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Ours is an age in which there is frequently a great deal of confusion about what constitutes true wealth.  This is especially true in the United States, and has been historically true of this country for at least a century.  Therefore, when I learned about the recent collapse of much of the cryptocurrency "industry", I was not surprised.  A long time ago I started expecting something like this to happen.  (For more information on the collapse, see the Washington Post article "Crypto 'Winter' has come.  Will it become an ice age?" and the European Central Bank essay titled, Crypto dominos: the bursting crypto bubbles and the destiny of digital finance" also.) 

I was slow to hear about cryptocurrencies when they first made waves, and I never really developed any interest in them.  A big turnoff was that they seemed to me to be simply a vastly more complicated way of doing what regular money was supposed to do - namely to act as a medium of commercial exchange.  And the schemes for making money from investing in cryptocurrencies (or as those who were 'hip' and 'with it' called them, "crypto") seemed to me after a while to be more complicated than even fluid mechanics calculations like the Navier-Stokes equation.  I swiftly came to the following conclusions regarding crypto:

• It was a means of promising early "investors" the chance to get something for nothing.
• It therefore had no intrinsic value or essential use in the world.
• It was therefore the perfect material for blowing financial bubbles.
• One day the bubbles would pop.

The recent pop of these bubbles (along with the accompanying pictures of people being led away to jail) has confirmed all of my conclusions.  It has also confirmed my belief and assertion that we live in a moral universe, and that those who violate the moral standard of that universe sooner or later must face the outworkings of their own damnation.  You really do reap what you've sown.  This has been true of the crypto schemers who set up the schemes by which they sought to defraud others.  But it is also true of many of those who were defrauded, for they were hooked by the promise of easy money - that is, by the promise of obtaining something for nothing.  Had they themselves not been led astray by their own evil desire, they would not have fallen prey to those who were more clever in doing evil.  The fact that bubbles like these continue to be blown speaks volumes about our present society - both about its perpetrators and about its victims.  The fact that an entire industry has arisen out of the desire to use mathematics as a tool of swindling speaks volumes about our misplaced collective values.  Bubbles like crypto are an inescapable feature of a society whose economy is built on usury.

So for those of us who seek to build true and lasting wealth in the midst of uncertain times, what should be our strategy?  As I have said before on this blog, our strategy should consist of the following elements:

• Do not desire to get rich.
• Learn essential skills.  Or, to put it another way, learn to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, that you may not be unfruitful.
• Live simply.  Focus on the essentials.

Do these things and you will go a long way toward bubble-proofing yourself.  You will also save yourself from the ravages of late-stage capitalism.

The Forecaster's Eyeglasses

A major focus of this blog has been to try to guess the outlines of the future, and to outline possible strategies for preparing for that future.  People who try to guess the outlines of the future need a certain mindset if they intend to safely engage in the guessing game without making fools of themselves.  One essential characteristic of the required mindset is humility - the kind of humility which keeps the guessers from taking themselves and their guesses so seriously that they are unwilling to take on emerging information which may contradict the original guesses.  Another essential characteristic is curiosity - the kind of curiosity which dedicates itself to observing and tracking emerging trends.  Lastly, what is needed is precision - a rigorous logical precision in evaluating both one's guesses and one's observations, as well as logical rigor in evaluating whether one's observations confirm one's original guesses.  The scientific method is an example of this kind of rigorous precision.  

A large body of guesses about the future has to do with the effects of resource depletion and environmental degradation on modern industrial society.  As an example we can consider the many books written on the subject during the first decade of the 21st century.  Spokespersons such as Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, Nicole Foss, and Raul Ilargi Meijer promoted the view that the world's supplies of petroleum were on the verge of entering a phase of declining output, and that this irreversible decline in output would trigger catastrophic changes in the world's industrial societies, or to put it more starkly, the sudden catastrophic collapse of industrial society.  Some of the predictions of these people seemed to leave the realm of fact-based analysis entirely and became instead the embodiment of the subconscious night terror of white Anglo-European society over the possible loss of their own dominance and control of the earth.

So how did the predictions of these people fare in the face of events?  The answer is decidedly mixed.  Many of these predictors were able to draw the correct linkage between the impending decline of global petroleum output and U.S. foreign policy under the presidency of George W. Bush.  And according to the analysis of the German Energy Watch Group, the world has indeed long since passed the peak of global conventional oil production.  However, the predictions of the "collapsitarians" failed to account for the technological innovations which allowed the petroleum industry to temporarily boost output of petroleum liquids by means of fracking, ultra-deep drilling, horizontal drilling and other unconventional means.  (Of course, the use of these techniques also led to widespread groundwater contamination as well.)  These predictions also failed to account for the innovations in solar pv cell production, electricity storage technology, and electric vehicle design which have occurred from 2010 onward.  (However, these predictors of collapse did manage to breathe new life into a genre of literature which had gone dormant after the threat of nuclear war seemed to recede from the 1980's onward - namely the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction!  Move over, John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss, Pat Frank, Stephen King, and Walter M. Miller - you've got new neighbors...)

In other words, while resource shortages have begun to appear, they have been partially mitigated by technological advances.  Thus, society in general has most definitely not collapsed.  Yet ordinary people - especially those who are not among the privileged - have found that the number of potential threats in their environment has multiplied.  We who are not among the world's privileged therefore must learn to navigate that threat environment.  This navigation will require us to identify both emergent trends and potential risks.  So I'd like to lay out a few of these trends and risks in the remaining space in this post.  Let's consider the following:

• Energy.  The global energy situation is a mixed bag at present.  As mentioned above, global oil production is definitely past peak right now, and I'd like to suggest that this includes not only conventional oil, but all petroleum liquids.  This is why oil prices had begun to rise in 2021 even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  What is more, global production of coal may already have peaked.  According to the Energy Watch Group, global production of uranium has also already peaked.  Therefore the outlook is not good for those societies and industries which rely primarily on fossil fuel.  However, the outlook for renewables - especially solar photovoltaics - is quite sunny.  (Pardon the pun.)  As mentioned previously on this blog, analyses conducted by the German Energy Watch Group show that the transformation of global industrial societies entirely to renewable energy conveyed by electricity is well within the capabilities of these societies.  That transformation was already in progress before the start of this year, and has only accelerated as nations have come to realize that they cannot allow themselves to become dependent on the resources of thug regimes with imperial ambitions such as Russia.

One wild card in the energy mix is the potential contribution from nuclear fusion energy.  Two weeks ago the United States achieved ignition for the first time in a laser-triggered inertial confinement fusion experiment.  What this means is that by using laser light to implode a fusion target, the experimenters were able to produce more energy than the lasers used to initiate the fusion reaction.  However, this does not mean that a practical commercial fusion reactor is just around the corner.  So far, most fusion experiments have focused on the deuterium-tritium reaction, which produces most of its energy in a form that is very hard to harness for electricity generation.  The reaction also produces a very high neutron flux, which tends to destroy reactor materials over time in addition to producing lots of radioactive waste.  The disadvantages of the deuterium-tritium reaction represent a serious engineering challenge.  It remains to be seen whether that challenge can be overcome.

• Material Resources. I don't have time today to do an exhaustive analysis of resource bottlenecks, but I can definitely say that shortages of key materials have begun to appear in a number of industries.  Taking the construction industry as an example, from 2020 onward there have been shortages of lumber and steel.  In addition, there have been increasing shortages and delays in obtaining finished construction assemblies such as electrical switchboards, switchgear and transformers.  The appearance of shortages need not be a catastrophic thing, but shortages will force the world's economies to shift to a more circular model.  This will force a shift in the ideologies of many right-leaning people in the United States, for instance.  The good news is that a number of heavy industrial corporations have begun to move toward embracing the circular economy.  However, the existence and increasing severity of material shortages may prove to be more of an economic constraint than the shortage of energy was supposed to be.

• Climate and Environment.  The events of the past three or four years have provided blatant proof of the accelerating pace of global warming and its resulting environmental degradation.  From the spectacular Russian wildfires (most of which were caused by humans) which took place every year during the last ten years to the massive wildfires and smoke events which occurred in the western United States in 2020 to the horrible extreme temperatures which were seen in the U.S. Pacific Northwest in 2021, we have begun to witness weather events which have not been seen on the earth for millions of years.  Moreover, recent studies show that the melting of the earth's permanent ice is happening as much as 100 times faster than scientific models have predicted.  Many have predicted that increasing alteration of the earth's climate will result in large-scale migration of "climate refugees" from more chaotic or inhospitable regions to more habitable regions of the earth.  The assumption has been that these refugees will be from among the world's poorest people.  But it seems to me - especially given the random distribution of extreme weather events over the last few years - that many of these refugees may come from the world's most affluent populations.  Think of rich retired snowbirds fleeing from Arizona or jet-setters fleeing coastal resort properties in Florida.  Perhaps the best prospects will belong to those people who are wise and savvy enough to make a habitable space wherever they may find themselves - even if it means making one's bed in Sheol.

• Social Justice and Human Rights.  It is in this area that the greatest threats have arisen over the last decade.  The poor and oppressed populations of the earth won a number of significant victories during the 20th century.  Those victories led to such things as the end of the British Empire, the liberation of formerly colonized nations in the Global South, and the establishment of polities of liberated people who were able to begin to build their own collective power in order to fulfill their own human potential.  A number of observers including both social scientists and science fiction writers predicted that this trend would only continue until the entire earth had become an egalitarian society in which each human being was valued equally and in which each human being could flourish.  However, such idealistic thinking failed to recognize the latent power and personality-disordered nature of the oppressors, nor did it take into account the fact that the oppressors began to organize themselves to take back their lost glory.  Thus many of us failed to notice the efforts - at first subtle, then more blatant - which began from 1980 onward in the United States to attempt to reverse all the civil rights gains achieved by the nonwhite in the United States from 1865 onward.  We failed to recognize the emergence of revanchists both domestically and globally.

Now we stand at a crossroads - especially those of us who are people of color in the United States.  Our strategy to date for dealing with the re-emergent threats we face has been inadequate, to say the least.  That strategy has consisted of joining ourselves to a "progressive" agenda which does not place our unique concerns first and foremost, because it was not set by us.  Those who push this agenda on us have instructed us to engage in a "strategy" which largely consists of begging the oppressor to be nice.  This hasn't worked.  We have allowed our struggle to be hijacked by people whose priorities are not our priorities.  And we who are people of color in the United States have allowed ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda, in the hopes that we might be able to receive some of the crumbs which fall from the table of that someone else when they have accomplished their agenda.

We need to start constructing our own agenda.  That agenda must start with us coming together to create our own structures of self-reliance just as Gandhi did in India at the beginning of his struggle against British imperialism.  This will involve struggle and hard work.  We need to stop being afraid of struggle and hard work.  To quote from a certain book on strategic nonviolent resistance, we need to realize that "the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility."  Or, to put it another way, if I get out of bed and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and I find a wolf there, it is 100 percent the wolf's fault if I get eaten by the wolf, since most reasonable people would never have any reason to expect a wolf in their houses.  (That nasty wolf must have sneaked in!)  But if I live in a place where wolves are commonplace and are very vicious, and I know this to be true, and yet I take no precautions when I leave my house, it is still 100 percent the wolf's fault if I get eaten, because the wolf is an evil, predatory beast whose evil nature moved him to start chewing on me.  But in this case, it is also 100 percent my fault, because I knew that there were wolves near my house, and I knew what sort of creatures wolves are, and yet I did nothing to protect myself.  Chew on that for a while.

Note that this list is not exhaustive.  In particular, I ran out of time to discuss the emergence of potential pandemic threats and the threats to public health which have resulted from the spread of disinformation and denialism by the Global Far Right.  Nor did I discuss the geopolitical threat posed by national revanchism, although this naturally follows from a consideration of threats to human rights and social justice.  While Russia is a blatant example of a revanchist threat, it is by no means the only example.  And there is the question of how the emergence of artificial machine intelligence will evolve and how much of an impact it will make on our daily lives.   But I must leave these considerations for another day.

A Story That Illustrates: The Sea Goddess' Bloom

This weekend is once again one of those weekends in which I have very little time for anything except catching up on work.  So today's post will be extra short.  However, I'd like to recommend a story which was published recently in an online magazine/podcast combination known as Escape Pod.  The name of the story is "The Sea Goddess' Bloom" and it was written by Uchechukwu Nwaka, a Ph.D lecturer at the Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education in Nigeria.  To me, the story and character arcs are a beautiful illustration of a point I made in a post on this blog titled, "How The Straight Subverts The Crooked."

The N-Soul Problem

In a couple of recent posts I discussed the phenomenon of megaprojects - that is, those large-scale, costly projects which are undertaken by a society when all of its members become united in the pursuit of  particular goals which the megaprojects are designed to meet.  The pursuit of the goal embodied by the megaproject alters the lives of everyone in the society undertaking the project, because it requires each member of the society to make a sacrifice in order to contribute toward the goal.  Perhaps the earliest historical example of a megaproject is the Tower of Babel mentioned in Genesis 11:1-9.  More recent examples of megaprojects include the war economies which were arranged by the various governments which fought World War Two, as well as the rebuilding of some of those economies which occurred in the aftermath of that war.  The U.S. space program became something of a megaproject in the 1960's when President Kennedy set the goal of landing an American on the moon before the end of the decade.  A much more prosaic example of a megaproject is the construction of the U.S. interstate highway system under President Eisenhower during the 1950's.

I'd like to suggest that megaprojects play a key role in the wholesale transformation and advance of a society.  I'd also like to suggest that there are three important conditions which must be fulfilled in order for a megaproject to realize its full transformative potential:

1. The leaders of a society must be wise in their choice of the goal which a megaproject is supposed to meet;
2. The leaders must present the vision and goal of the megaproject in a way that unites the souls of the members of society behind that goal;
3. And, the leaders must be wise in organizing the contributions of each member of the society in fulfilling that goal.

It is at points 2 and 3 that trouble can come.  Point 1 is also a place of potential trouble - if the leaders of a society choose an unrighteous goal, eventually their project will fail, as the builders of Babel found out.  But I'd like to focus especially on the pitfalls contained in points 2 and 3.  The success of point 2 depends not only on the wisdom and persuasiveness of the leaders of a society, but also on all the members of the society itself.  For instance, if the members of a society are generally unselfish and willing to make contributions toward a greater good, they can be more easily united behind a good goal.  If, however, the members of a society are rabidly selfish and individualistic, then it becomes much harder for any leader to unite them behind the sort of transformative goal that requires an unselfish contribution from each member.  The success or failure of point 3 depends on the humility (or lack thereof) of the leaders of the society.  The leaders will have the greatest chance of success if they recognize that the people from whom they are asking contributions bring not only their material wealth and the strength of their bodies, but also their minds (or souls) - that is, their unique ideas and perspectives.  Those leaders who set a goal and then "hire" the members of their societies "from the shoulders down" as mere drones to fulfill the grand plan of the leaders may find their grand plan failing.

Now one way to destroy a society's ability to conceive and implement megaprojects is to destroy that society's ability to combine.  This is what happened at the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages of everyone on earth because their unified goal was evil.  But it is also possible for evil agents to confuse the ability of a society to undertake large-scale transformative projects of good.  How is this done?  Simply by teaching or persuading a majority of the members of the society to become selfish, materialistic, and individualistic.  This has been the trajectory of American society over the last four decades under the influence of right-wing American media.  It should be no surprise therefore that the ability of the U.S. to engage in transformative megaprojects has declined as well (at the same time that loneliness and alienation in American society has increased).  There is an urgent need for the kind of transformative megaprojects that can enable the United States to weather the 21st century challenges of declining resource availability, increasing environmental degradation, and a changing climate.  But rigid adherence to free-market ideology and excessive reliance on private-sector solutions is hindering the emergence of the needed megaprojects.  A case in point is the success with which the American Right attacked the Green New Deal.

On the other hand, there are the societies of China and Singapore, in which the coordination between the State and private industry is much tighter, and there is still a fair amount of collective spirit.  As a result, China has the most advanced urban infrastructure in the world, and leads the world in rapid transit technology including high-speed rail.  In fact, China is now a major exporter of high-speed rail technology.  Similarly, the Chinese higher education system is the result of intense, goal-oriented State strategic planning which has begun to produce universities which are among the most prestigious in the world.  (Consider Tsinghua University, for instance, which is among the top twenty universities worldwide according to one metric.)  This is occurring at a time in which many American universities are declining in world rankings due to a lack of public funding for basic research.  And the story of Singapore is no less impressive, as demonstrated by the article cited at the end of this post.  But a problem arises in more collectivist societies if the leaders of those societies become insecure and hence begin to assert an unhealthy level of control over the initiative of their private members.  Hence, Chinese President Xi Jinping's actions and policies have begun to threaten the megaproject of Chinese transformation begun by Deng Xiaoping.

So we have two ends of a continuum: on the one hand, rampant, laissez-faire individualism which prevents people from combining in any way to achieve goals larger than the individual, and on the other hand, a central control which quashes individual initiative and stifles diverse insights.  The United States lies on one end of this continuum and is declining as a result.  China under Xi Jinping has begun to move toward the other end of the continuum and has begun to suffer as a result.  Physicists and astronomers sometimes talk about the n-body problem - that is, the problem of trying to mathematically describe the motions of three or more bodies in orbit around a common center.  I'd like to suggest what I call the "n-soul problem" - that is, how to organize people into groups that most effectively undertake transformative projects for good.  Those who successfully solve this problem will do well.  

For further reading on megaprojects, see "Megaprojects for Megaregions: Global Cases and Takeaways" by John Landis and the U.S. Department of Transportation.