Feedback Inversion

The way domesticated humans and animals diverge from their wild counterparts isn’t random…it follows a predictable systems pattern that has analogues in ecology, cybernetics, even thermodynamics.

What is it? What’s the key transformation?

The organism shifts away from being regulated by feedback to being regulated despite it.

That’s what domestication does (in animals or humans). It removes or blunts the organism’s natural ability to respond to environmental signals, and replaces that responsiveness with compliance to an imposed system. And the divergence unfolds along a bunch of predictable dimensions…

Cognitive Shift (From Adaptation to Control)

Wild mind: constantly updating based on local, real-time feedback

Domesticated mind: defers to rules, roles, or authority (even when they contradict experience)

Behavioral Shift (From Function to Performance)

Wild behavior: serves a real purpose (find food, avoid danger, bond)

Domesticated behavior: serves a symbolic or imposed role (obedience, etiquette, branding)

(In cybernetics, this resembles a loss of negative feedback…the system stops adjusting based on outcome, and instead preserves form through positive feedback, locking in behavior.)

Sensory Shift (From Vigilance to Tolerance)

Wild senses: alert, acute, tuned to survival-relevant input

Domesticated senses: dulled, filtered, or overridden to tolerate noise, confinement, social overload

Affective Shift (From Co-regulation to Suppression)

Wild emotions: socially functional, tied to reality

Domesticated emotions: repressed, misdirected, or disconnected from actual stimuli (chronic anxiety, performative joy)

Structural Shift (From Efficiency to Excess)

Wild bodies: lean, efficient, stress-adapted

Domesticated bodies: neotenous (juvenile traits), prone to disease, dependent on infrastructure)

So what’s going on in this domestication process? Particularly in human behavior?

You could call it feedback inversion. A systemic reversal of the role of feedback…from a guide to coherence to a threat to be suppressed, ignored, or distorted.

And I’d argue that the domesticated (“neurotypical”) human mind is a product of feedback inversion…trained to override bodily, sensory, and ecological signals in favor of symbolic, delayed, or externally enforced rules.

Let’s track this.

Control comes first.

1. A group (or system) seeks to stabilize its environment, secure resources, prevent loss, dominate others, etc. This is an impulse that demands predictability and reduced uncertainty.
2. And to exert control, you have to ignore certain inconvenient signals. The hunger of others. The pain of subordinates. The ecological damage you’re causing. Your own body’ needs. In other words, you begin inverting feedback. You treat reality’s signals as noise.
3. Once you have symbolic systems (laws, money, ideologies) in place to maintain control, they begin rewarding those who suppress feedback and punishing those who respond to it. Now we have a positive feedback loop. The more control you assert, the more feedback you need to ignore. And the more feedback you ignore, the more “brittle” your control becomes…so you assert even more.
4. Over time, the system selects for feedback-insensitive participants. Now control isn’t just enforced…it’s embodied. Now feedback sensitivity looks like deviance.

Once embedded, feedback inversion maintains control by filtering out any kind of destabilizing truth, prevents course correction, and confers survival advantage on the most disconnected people (until the system crashes). It starts as a tool of control but becomes a systemic pathology.