System Failure
And the humans kept trying to control and own their environment, so as to make the world a more certain place. What they didn’t understand, and seemed willfully in denial about even trying to look at, was that the very efforts they took to create a world of certainty, were the very things that would author the upcoming collapse of multiple world systems.
It is a misunderstanding about how systems work, and a deep desire to define truth instead of accepting it. All of our efforts to make a safe and secure world, to make reality more predictable and increase survival probability in the short term have something in common-to reduce complexity. In extremely complex organic systems like the earth, that complexity is the root of its stability, its equilibrium. When we put tons of effort into controlling it, and overuse the same resources, and ignore the “externalities” in the assumption that the robustness of the planet can just absorb it, we create the conditions for collapse.
7+ billion replicator robots of consumption feeding on a dynamic system without consideration of the balance evolution spent billions of years building; thinking we can simply dominate to force outcomes, is destabilizing that equilibrium. Systems within systems within systems of complex balancing acts all collapsing because we would prefer our desires be fulfilled than take the ego hit of understanding that we are a barely intelligent, barely conscious animal that is SUBJECT to nature, not above it. A hubris of self-deluded self-focused desire to believe we are made from some anthropocentric projection of a god who made this world for us, instead of acknowledging that we have barely even emerged from the primordial stew that gave rise to our pithy and pathetic level of consciousness without any evidence of this free will we so like to claim.
And this problem is one of acceleration… This collapse will be a cascade of system failures that will devastate us much too quickly for any adaptations we can come up with.
The universe gave humans an incubator for life that could have sustained us for billions of years yet to come, but we took the path of a virus, and consumed and reproduced with barely any sense of reservation about it. We created gods and governments and cultures and systems all based on putting us upon a throne with all else there for us to do with as we please. We strove to make the world fit our desires instead of fitting our desires to the world, fighting with every breath for as much certainty as our power could muster… Now all of those efforts are about to give forth the fruits of all our labor, in the form of that very life-giving mother we call earth rejecting our sorry asses back down to a level befitting our pitiful level of self-awareness and understanding.
May your systems of control collapse under the weight of their own ignorance. May your gods and governments and societies and post-emergent cultures fail you so hard that you never consider them again. May your species be trimmed down till your numbers no longer overwhelm the systems of life that gave you the opportunity to focus on conscious development instead of your own importance.
At this point, the collapse needs to be brutal. Because humans keep repeating the same failure models, and it would seem that nothing less than almost total devastation will help to change the way we think enough to not keep repeating it.
Originally published at https://www.binary-chaos.net.
