What’s the “civilizing process,” really?

Here it is, real fucking simple:

1. A need for control emerges. Scarcity, fear, or hierarchy drives the impulse to command others, landscapes, or outcomes. Control is applied against natural feedback (hunger, resistance, erosion, protest).
   
2. To sustain that control, you need to suppress feedback. Deny pain. Punish dissent. Delay ecological consequences. All kinds of symbolic systems (laws, gods, spreadsheets) start replacing direct experience. Well done!
   
3. Accomplish full feedback inversion. You need people to internalize the system. You need them to override their bodies, emotions, and instincts to fit the abstraction. The more disconnected they become, the more compliant they’ll be.
   
4. Reward feedback-insensitive traits…compliance, social performance, dulled cognition (dumbness), emotional suppression. These traits reproduce the conditions for control.
   
5. Expand control. New territories. More refined hierarchies. Tighter schedules. Now you’ll see new forms of feedback inversion emerge (currency, bureaucracy, digital metrics).
   
6. Repeat. Spiral. Expand.

What is this loop? It’s civilization!! It’s domestication in both human and nonhuman systems.

Civilization is a positive feedback loop between control and feedback inversion. Don’t be fooled by the shiny poetry and porta potties…it’s:

• hierarchy
• standardization
• surveillance
• predictive modeling
• coercive compliance
• ecological collapse

…and it punishes:

• sensitivity
• divergence
• embodiment
• ecological attunement
• spontaneity
• truth

Civilization isn’t just TikTok and Trump…it’s so much less than that. It’s cancer. It’s entropy. It’s a runaway control-feedback inversion loop that selects against reality-responsive traits.

And domestication is that loop embodied…in animals, plants, and people.