Episode 2 was certainly more ideologically palatable, but it was still epistemologically dubious, and once again narratively ridiculous.
The jist of it was that someone conceived of ‘the ecosystem’, whereby nature has a constant process that finds an equilibrium and stays steady. Some bright sparks applied this idea to human civilization. Some people made theoretical models or computer models to simulate how the global political ecoystem (as they saw/imagined it) would fare in the long run, and concluded we were all headed for economical-political disaster, even though their models were grossly over-simplified (in some cases outright disregarding data that had been collected).
Allegedly it all came crashing down when further research showed the basic ideas of ecology were very flawed and that nature in fact was in constant turmoil from a historical perspective, not equilibrium. And of course their models never amounted to anything. Other points of note is that hippies who set up communes to try and realize these equilibrium ideas, but they all failed within a few years. Also the authorities that promoted these equilibrium ideas were far from neutral parties (eg. the racist british colonial rules of South Africa). In general the massive flaw in the theory seemed to be that the global system envisaged did not take into account feedback loops - if a pattern of behaviour is moving people towards disaster/suffering, they will likely adapt and change rather than charge headlong into it. The problem morphs, changes into something else, in a new context.
The problem is, I’ve got no idea how much of this guy’s summation of ecology and systems theory is legitemate commentry. For all I know there’s ecologists and hippies turning blue in the face watching this thing. He probably didn’t misrepresent any of the core ideas, but like the Objectivism episode he probably neglected to mention essential counter-points/rebuttals.
And the other problem is I’ve got no idea how much weight these ideas really carried. He’s probably drastically overstating things.
Oh and there was some stuff about the internet as a self-regulating ecosystem tacked on- he was saying it was illusory freedom or something. He had examples or Iran and Ukraine and Kazaighstan revolutions which were driven by the internet, but said they all failed in very short order so the internet was not really a benefit. Thing is, he would have made this show before the whole Arab uprising last summer. Bit like how he made his last show Power of Nightmares, about the illusion of terrorism, a few months before the London underground bombings.
Having said that, I met some of these hippie ecology nuts recently. They gave a talk and showed a video about hippie squatters being evicted from London housing (they were trying to live as an agrarian commune), had some valid points about anti-freedom laws, and then handed out this technical diagram from Shannon’s communication theory without a word of explanation. I was like, wtf.
If there’s a theme for the series so far it seems to be that ideas of a systematic or mechanistic nature, especially when backed up by computer modelling, lead people astray and leave them in deep trouble… AND are exploited by sinister elites.
If he was really genuine there HAS to be an episode about global warming.