Civilization is the Problem | binary-chaos
Every civilization eventually collapses… Because a civilization is by design an attempt to live outside of the natural equilibrium.
The Egyptians, The Romans, the Mayans, etc. All of them fell because they disconnected themselves from the balance nature had created, and created civilizations which put them at the center of the universe.
When science and reason invented technologies it needed to cheat nature effectively enough to avoid the standard blowbacks others had that made them collapse, it did so by figuring out how to borrow larger and larger amounts of energy from the greater system.
Our health care, our machines, our laws, all cheating the natural feedback mechanisms and borrowing more and more power, reducing the complexity of the natural systems until the earth itself had no more capacity to absorb the change. The wars that kept the populations down were deemed immoral for the most and only the poor (thought of as disposable) fought, leaving the majority to continue consuming and replicating and believing, that the world was made for them.
And when it finally fell, it wasn’t like before. The abuse had been so extensive that the collapse wasn’t simple to be absorbed back into the system. This time it had disrupted so many systems that it affected every form of natural life and every natural supporting system life depended on, disrupting billions of years of growth in just a few hundred years. This time it brought down the entire ecosystem.
Because that is what happens when you decide nature is there for you to control and dominate, and was put there at your disposal. You dismissed all the warnings, all the signs, all those who saw how badly things were being damaged. You killed the cultures that tried to teach you to be one with the earth, and instead kept building your civilizations until the earth had no choice but to return the favor.
Because that is what happens when you borrow more energy from a system than it has to hold on to its equilibrium, its careful balance of life and death necessary to keep things going.
We were never capable of this much before, and in our hubris, we thought we’d just have to accelerate our understanding until we knew how to fix the damage. The problem is that we weren’t as smart as we thought, a kind of Dunning Kruger consciousness that was better at deluding itself than growing in its capacity to see beyond its own importance.
We thought civilization meant we had advanced and left the primitive behind, when really by ignoring our connections to nature, we bit the hand that fed us so badly that no hand was there left to pick us up when we fell, hard.
Originally published at https://www.binary-chaos.net.
