The First to Fall

The Civilizing Process IS Domestication

Domestication is the process by which organisms are selectively shaped to be compliant, predictable, and dependent on human-controlled environments…often at the cost of sensory acuity, autonomy, and ecological fitness.

Civilization is the expansion of symbolic control over individuals and groups through norms, rules, abstraction, and institutions…suppressing direct feedback, internal regulation, and spontaneous behavior in favor of obedience and symbolic order.

They’re one and the same.

They both suppress feedback sensitivity. (To control an organism or a population, you have to prevent it from reacting authentically to harm, injustice, or incoherence.)

They both favor neoteny. (Juvenile traits like compliance, passivity, and external regulation are selected and extended into adulthood.)

They both shift behavior from function to performance. (The wild animal hunts; the domesticated animal waits. The wild human responds; the civilized human performs.)

They both create dependence. (On artificial systems…pens, laws, currencies, screens…rather than ecological loops.)

They both sever feedback loops. (To domesticate is to disable the plant’s / animal’s relationship with “wild” cues. To civilize is to disable the human’s relationship with embodied, emotional, and ecological reality.)

Domestication is the biological manifestation of the civilizing process, and civilization is domestication scaled, abstracted, and systematized. This isn’t metaphor…they’re identical. Different names for the same thing.

So what?

  1. What we call “progress” is maladaptation. If civilization selects against feedback-sensitive traits, then most hallmarks of progress (obedience, emotional detachment, performance under duress) aren’t improvements. They’re symptoms of ecological and cognitive degradation.
  2. “Neurotypical” is a pathology of fit. In other words, the “typical” mind in civilization is one that fits a feedback-suppressed system…not one that is healthy or coherent. What we call “mental health” is largely the ability to suppress warning signals.
  3. Collapse is the endpoint. A system that inverts feedback can’t self-correct. It accumulates error until it fails catastrophically. Collapse isn’t a failure of civ…it’s its logical endpoint.
  4. Modern humans aren’t baseline humans. Just as dogs aren’t wolves, modern humans aren’t the baseline human phenotype. We’re shaped by millennia of selection for compliance, abstraction, emotional control, and symbolic performance.
  5. Resistance to this process (civilization / domestication) is a biological signal. Individuals who resist conformity, abstraction, or symbolic authority aren’t broken…they’re retaining functional traits that no longer fit the dominant system. Autism, ADHD, sensitivity, oppositionality, and “mental illness” often represent intact feedback systems in an inverted environment.

What are the real products of civilization? Not culture, but civilization?

We have some intentional products (ones designed to enforce control):

  • Laws / punishment systems (enforce behavior abstracted from context or consequence)
  • Religions of obedience (codify submission and moralize hierarchy)
  • Schooling (standardizes cognition and behavior to serve symbolic roles)
  • Currencies / bureaucracies (replace direct reciprocity with quantifiable abstraction)
  • Surveillance (ensures conformity without requiring local trust or co-regulation)
  • Cages / fences / walls / uniforms / schedules (tools to overwrite instinct)

And we have some inadvertent ones (usually denied or pathologized):

  • Mental illness epidemics (result from prolonged feedback suppression and coerced performance)
  • Chronic disease (where natural regulation is replaced by artificial inputs)
  • Addiction (coping mechanism for living in a system where natural pleasure and feedback loops are severed)
  • Anxiety and control-seeking (nothing is safe, responsive, or coherent)
  • Loneliness / alienation (loss of meaningful co-regulation and mutual reliance)
  • Ecological destruction (consequences are insulated against)
  • Pathologization of feedback-sensitive people (framing coherence-seeking organisms as dysfunctional because they can’t / won’t adapt to incoherence)

Written by

Ken

in

Domestication is the process by which organisms are selectively shaped to be compliant, predictable, and dependent on human-controlled environments…often at the cost of sensory acuity, autonomy, and ecological fitness.

Civilization is the expansion of symbolic control over individuals and groups through norms, rules, abstraction, and institutions…suppressing direct feedback, internal regulation, and spontaneous behavior in favor of obedience and symbolic order.

They’re one and the same.

They both suppress feedback sensitivity. (To control an organism or a population, you have to prevent it from reacting authentically to harm, injustice, or incoherence.)

They both favor neoteny. (Juvenile traits like compliance, passivity, and external regulation are selected and extended into adulthood.)

They both shift behavior from function to performance. (The wild animal hunts; the domesticated animal waits. The wild human responds; the civilized human performs.)

They both create dependence. (On artificial systems…pens, laws, currencies, screens…rather than ecological loops.)

They both sever feedback loops. (To domesticate is to disable the plant’s / animal’s relationship with “wild” cues. To civilize is to disable the human’s relationship with embodied, emotional, and ecological reality.)

Domestication is the biological manifestation of the civilizing process, and civilization is domestication scaled, abstracted, and systematized. This isn’t metaphor…they’re identical. Different names for the same thing.

So what?

  1. What we call “progress” is maladaptation. If civilization selects against feedback-sensitive traits, then most hallmarks of progress (obedience, emotional detachment, performance under duress) aren’t improvements. They’re symptoms of ecological and cognitive degradation.
  2. “Neurotypical” is a pathology of fit. In other words, the “typical” mind in civilization is one that fits a feedback-suppressed system…not one that is healthy or coherent. What we call “mental health” is largely the ability to suppress warning signals.
  3. Collapse is the endpoint. A system that inverts feedback can’t self-correct. It accumulates error until it fails catastrophically. Collapse isn’t a failure of civ…it’s its logical endpoint.
  4. Modern humans aren’t baseline humans. Just as dogs aren’t wolves, modern humans aren’t the baseline human phenotype. We’re shaped by millennia of selection for compliance, abstraction, emotional control, and symbolic performance.
  5. Resistance to this process (civilization / domestication) is a biological signal. Individuals who resist conformity, abstraction, or symbolic authority aren’t broken…they’re retaining functional traits that no longer fit the dominant system. Autism, ADHD, sensitivity, oppositionality, and “mental illness” often represent intact feedback systems in an inverted environment.

What are the real products of civilization? Not culture, but civilization?

We have some intentional products (ones designed to enforce control):

  • Laws / punishment systems (enforce behavior abstracted from context or consequence)
  • Religions of obedience (codify submission and moralize hierarchy)
  • Schooling (standardizes cognition and behavior to serve symbolic roles)
  • Currencies / bureaucracies (replace direct reciprocity with quantifiable abstraction)
  • Surveillance (ensures conformity without requiring local trust or co-regulation)
  • Cages / fences / walls / uniforms / schedules (tools to overwrite instinct)

And we have some inadvertent ones (usually denied or pathologized):

  • Mental illness epidemics (result from prolonged feedback suppression and coerced performance)
  • Chronic disease (where natural regulation is replaced by artificial inputs)
  • Addiction (coping mechanism for living in a system where natural pleasure and feedback loops are severed)
  • Anxiety and control-seeking (nothing is safe, responsive, or coherent)
  • Loneliness / alienation (loss of meaningful co-regulation and mutual reliance)
  • Ecological destruction (consequences are insulated against)
  • Pathologization of feedback-sensitive people (framing coherence-seeking organisms as dysfunctional because they can’t / won’t adapt to incoherence)

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