The First to Fall

Tag: science

  • Scarcity -> Conflict

    I believe it was Geoff Lawton who said the next war would be fought over water. A liter of clean water is already more valuable on the market than a liter of crude oil…and in the systems we’ve created, scarcity always leads to conflict.

    In ecology, scarcity is feedback. Hunger pushes foraging…drought pushes migration. And in small-scale human societies, conflict over scarcity was usually managed by mobility, sharing, or groups splitting. But once we settled, scarcity became inescapable. Fixed fields…stored food…property…nobody wants to leave those things behind. We became “invested” and conflict became largely unavoidable.

    To prevent collapse from the inside, human coalitions developed ways to suppress reactivity. Strong reactivity (aggression, dissent, or any kind of stubborn autonomy) is dangerous in a sedentary groups subsisting on scarce resources. So selection shifted toward compliance and conformity…enforced first by gossip and ostracism (see Wrangham), then law, ideology, and force.

    It’s dangerously tempting to read civilization as a suite of conflict management “technologies.” But they’re not technologies…they’re stories. They’re descriptions of what is.

    Religion frames inequality and misfortune as God’s will. The doctrine of free will reframes poverty or failure as your own fault. Markets channel conflict into competition, but “solve” scarcity by creating…(artificial) scarcity. States monopolize violence to keep conflict from fracturing the states themselves. And AI is already talked about as a promise…a promise of an environment managed so perfectly that conflict never arises…where error signals are resolved (i.e. smoothed) even before they appear.

    These are stories. Post-hoc rationalizations and buffers. Each of them suppressing the conflict signals they themselves generate.

    What do I mean by that? Think of scarcity as resulting in prediction errors…unmet needs…violated expectations. Conflicts are behavioral responses to those errors. And civilization is the inflation of social priors (shared fictions, ideologies, gods) so that individuals suppress their error-driven responses in favor of compliance. This produces short-term stability…but it also severs feedback. And where feedback is severed, ecological and social errors accumulate.

    In other words, you should never see civilization as a solution to scarcity. It’s never been that. At best, at the smallest scale, it’s a short-term solution to conflict. By suppressing reactivity, it buys stability at the cost of accumulating and unregistered error. Like everything else civilization touches, it makes conflict less surprising…by smoothing, scripting, or relocating it.

  • ramble (predictive coding, autism,simulation)

    I have predictive coding (ala Clark, Friston, Vermeulen), autism, Schmachtenberger, Baudrillard, Hoffman, and some recent experiences tumbling about in my brain, desperately looking for synthesis. I feel threads that are impossible to ignore.

    Quick recap of predictive coding and autism.

    In predictive coding models of the brain, perception is made up of prediction and sensory input. “Normal” brains lean heavily on priors (models of what the world usually is) and only update when error signals are strong. Most accounts of autism describe either weak priors (less predictive or top-down bias…meaning each sensory signal hits with more raw force), or overly precise priors (my predictive model is too narrow or rigid…meaning any deviation is a kind of error for me. Either way, in practice, the world feels less stabilized by consensus for me. I don’t get to lean on the stories most people use to blur and smooth reality.

    While listening to a recent interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger, I was reminded that all models of reality are simplifications…they leave things out. Neurotypical perception is itself a model, with a heavy filtering function…a consensus map. From this perspective, if my priors are weaker (or overly precise)…I’m closer to a raw reality where models break down. For me, the “gaps” are almost always visible.

    From there, it’s an easy jump to Baudrillard’s warning, that modern societies live inside simulations (self-referential systems of signs, detached from reality). If I feel derealization…less of a “solid self” (I do)…that’s probably simply what it’s like to live in a symbolic order but not buy into it fully. The double empathy problem is essentially me feeling the seams of a simulation that others inhabit…seamlessly.

    This “self” itself is a model. It’s a predictive story your brain tells to stabilize your experience. And because my priors about selfhood are weaker (or less “sticky”), my sense of “I” feels fragile, intermittent, unreal, etc. In this fucked up place that the majority of people call “reality” (where everyone’s popping anti-depressants and obliterating the planet), my experience looks like “derealization” or “depersonalization,” but to me, it’s a kind of clarity…a deep unignorable recognition that the self is a construct. What becomes a deficit in this place (“I can’t hold reality/self together the way others do”) is a form of direct contact with the limits of models of reality (vs reality itself).

    Which leads me to a burning question I’ve had for a while now: What are the chances that predictive coding’s distinction between “normal” and “autistic” actually points to the neurotypical configuration being one of priors/assumptions about the world that (in contrast to a healthy adaptive baseline) are simply imprecise (overfitted to some inaccurate model of reality)?

    Neurotypical perception leans more on shared, top-down priors (context, expectations, social norms, etc.). That makes perception stable and efficient but extremely bias-prone. (Studies show that neurotypicals are more susceptible to visual illusions than autistic groups.)

    Like I mentioned before, autistic perception has been described as weaker/less precise priors (Pellicano & Burr), or over-precise prediction errors and simply different precision allocation (Van de Cruy’s HIPPEA; Friston/Lawson’s “aberrant precision”). Functionally, both mean less smoothing by priors and more “bottom-up” detail, with (what they say) are costs for generalization and volatile environments. Their conclusion is that autistic people “overestimate” environmental volatility (we update too readily), while NTs are able to charge through with their predictive models intact.

    And I have a real problem with this interpretation that I’ll get to shortly. But first, let’s explore the trajectory of the sort of consensus reality that I consider most neurotypical people to be living in….that set of strong priors/assumptions about the world that civilization shares. Because I have a hunch that its divergence from reality is an inevitable feature, not some sort of “bug” to be tweaked for.

    If we treat civilization itself as a kind of giant predictive-coding system, its “life story” looks eerily like the brain’s, where the priors are consensus itself.

    I see consensus reality as a stack of expectations or assumptions about the world shared by enough people to make coordination possible. Religion, law, money, the idea of a “nation”…these are all hyperpriors (assumptions so deep they’re almost never questioned). They make the world legible and predictable (people can trust a coin or a contract or a census).

    And just like in individual perception, civilization’s priors aren’t about truth…they’re about usefulness for coordination. A shared model works best when it ignores inconvenient detail and compresses messy reality. Divergence from reality is a feature…the system actually becomes stronger by denying nuance. For example, “grain is food” (simple, measurable, taxable). But reality is actually biodiversity, shifting ecologies, seed autonomy, etc. See how that works?

    This divergence from reality deepens in a few ways, the most obvious being self-reinforcement. Once a model is institutionalized, it defends itself with laws, armies, and propaganda. It also suppresses signals…inputs that contradict priors are treated as “prediction errors” to be minimized, not explored. And, back to Baudrillard, the model (that is civilization) refers increasingly to itself than to external reality (markets predicting markets, laws referencing laws, etc.). The longer it runs, the more this consensus model fine tunes and solidifies its own reality.

    From a civilizational perspective, divergence from reality is coherence. If everyone buys into the strong priors (money is real, my country is legitimate, my god demands I go to church), coordination scales up and up. The obvious cost is that the model loses contact with ecological and biological feedback…the “ground truth.” Collapse shows up when prediction error (ecological crises, famines, revolts) overwhelm the significant smoothing power of the priors.

    The bottom line is that civilization’s consensus model requires detachment to function. Life-as-it-is needs to be turned into life-as-the-system-says-it-is. In predictive coding terms, civ runs on priors so heavy they no longer update. In Baudrillard’s terms, simulation replaces reality. And in my own lived experience (as a “neurodivergent” person), derealization isn’t some kind of personal glitch…it’s what the whole system is doing, scaled up.

    This whole thing gets even more interesting when I think more deeply about the term “consensus.” It implies something everyone’s contributed to, doesn’t it? But that clearly isn’t the case. What’s actually happening is closer to consent under conditions…most people adopt civilization’s model because rejecting it carries penalties (exile, poverty, prison, ridicule). It seems to me that the “consensus” is really an agreement to suspend disbelief and act as if the shared model is real, regardless of who authored it.

    Whose model is it, then? It depends when and where you’re living. It could be state elites…kings, priests, bureaucrats historically defined categories like grain tallies, borders, and calendars. It could be economic elites…merchants, corporations, financiers shape models like money, markets, and “growth.” It could be cultural elites…professors, media, and educators maintain symbolic order (morality, legitimacy, and values). I don’t think it’s contentious to say that whatever the model, it reflects the interests of those with the leverage to universalize their interpretation. Everyone else gets folded into it as “participants,” but not authors.

    The commonly accepted narrative is that homo sapiens won out over other human species due to our ability to coordinate, and that nowhere is this coordination more evident than in the wonderous achievement we call Civilization. But why isn’t anyone asking the obvious question…coordination toward whose ends? Because coordination certainly isn’t “for humanity” in some neutral sense…it’s for the ends of those who set the priors. Grain-based states are coordinated bodies for taxation, armies, and monuments. Modern market democracies are coordinated bodies for consumption, productivity, and growth. The “consensus” isn’t valuable because it’s true…it’s valuable because it directs billions of bodies toward a goal profitable or stabilizing for a ruling class.

    Now we come up against the double bind of participation (as an autistic person, I’m intimately familiar with double binds). You may not have authored civilization’s model, but you can’t opt out without huge costs. Not participating is madness or heresy. I’m a dissenter and so I’m “out of touch with reality.” The pathologization of neurodivergent mismatch translates to me as: “You’re wrong. The consensus is reality.” To which I say, not only is consensus reality not reality…it isn’t fucking consensus, either. It’s a cheap trick….the imposition of someone else’s priors as if they were everyone’s. Calling it consensus simply disguises the extraction of coordination.

    I want to talk now about Vermeulen’s (and others’) conclusion that the weaker (or overly precise) priors that characterize autism come at the cost of not being able to navigate volatile environments.

    To me, this is just another example of the decontextualization rampant in psychology and related fields (I see it all grounded in a sort of captivity science). And, in this case, the context that’s not being accounted for is huge. I think Vermeulen and others falsely equivocate volatile SOCIAL environments and volatile environments in general.

    It’s been my experience (and that of others), that autistic people perform quite well in real crisis situations. When social smoothing has no real value (or can be a detriment, even). But Vermeulen seems to think that my ability to function is impaired in the face of volatility (he makes some stupid joke about how overthinking is the last thing you want to do if you cross paths with a bear…ridiculous). I find the argument spurious and context-blind (ironic, considering he defines autism itself as context blindness).

    The argument is as follows:

    Because autistic perception is characterized by weaker or overly precise priors, each signal is taken “too seriously” (less smoothing from context). In a volatile environment (fast-changing, noisy, unpredictable), this supposedly leads to overwhelm, slower decisions, or less stability. Therefore, autist priors are maladaptive in volatility. B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.

    Let’s pull the curtain back on Vermeulen’s hidden assumption.

    When researchers say “volatile environments,” they clearly mean volatile social environments. All you have to do is look at the nature of the studies, where success depends on rapid uptake of others’ intentions, ambiguous cues, unspoken norms, etc. In that kind of volatility, having weaker social priors (not automatically filling in the “shared model”) is costly. But it’s a category error to generalize that to volatility in all domains.

    In environments characterized by social volatility, strong priors (the ones neurotypicals rely on) smooth out the noise and let them act fluidly. I’ll grant you that. But what the fuck about ecological volatility? Physical volatility? Hello?!? Sudden threats, immediate danger, technical breakdowns, real-world crises…where over-reliance on priors blinds you to what’s happening (“This can’t be happening!!”, denial, social posturing). Here, weaker/precise priors are a fidelity to incoming data and clearly convey an advantage.

  • The Great Culling: How Civilization Engineered the Modern Male

    Somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE, something strange happened to the human genome. Specifically, the Y chromosome.

    Over a 2,000-year stretch, human genetic diversity experienced a massive contraction. At one point, only about 1 in 20 men were reproducing. That means 95% of male lineages vanished…poof…gone. Most men alive today descend from a shockingly narrow slice of the male population that lived during that window.

    So…what the hell happened?

    Civilization happened.

    Not in the TED Talk sense…with aqueducts, murals, and democracy, but in the REAL sense…with hierarchy, slavery, and reproductive monopoly.

    The dawn of social stratification. More specifically, the sorting and discarding of people under systems of control. Yet more specifically, men controlling and flattening each other, themselves, women, and their environments with castes and dynasties, priesthoods and palaces, slavery and statehood, patrilineal inheritance, and elite polygyny (harems). And a certain kind of man systematically slaughtering every other kind of man.

    This wasn’t a simple population dip (women were still passing on their genes)…it was a selection event. And it coincides with when the process we call “civilization” was going into hyperdrive. Let that sink in for a moment. The selection event, where the genetic lines of 95 out of 100 men ended….wasn’t random. It was engineered by emerging systems that rewarded a very specific type of man…and erased the rest.

    Let’s be clear about what this means.

    When only a tiny elite of men get to reproduce (thanks to war, rape, slavery, or sheer status monopoly), you get a collapse in Y-chromosome diversity. Genetic drift goes wild. Founder effects explode. Suddenly, the behavioral and physiological traits of those few “winners” echo through the generations.

    What kinds of traits? What did the 5% of men still reproducing have in common?

    Well, to survive a slave system (on either side of the equation), you need emotional suppression. To survive a caste system? You need to be obedient to the hierarchy. A priesthood? Symbolic fluency (be good with complex bullshit). To reproduce in a monarchy? Performative loyalty.

    You simply don’t need egalitarianism, independence, or sensitivity to injustice. In fact, those traits will get you killed (or at least reproductively erased). It’s naive to think that a process like this just weeded out bodies…it weeded out minds.

    Over generations, civilization reshapes the species to favor male behaviors that reinforce civilized systems (status-seeking, dominance within rules, emotional control, strategic conformity). We call this “civilized” behavior. It sounds great, because it implies that the only alternative is (and was) resource-seeking, dominance without rules, little to no emotional control, and constant rebellion. But before we even explore whether that’s true, let’s acknowledge the fact that “civilized” behavior is nothing but system-optimized behavior, filtered through thousands of years of brutal selection.

    Meanwhile, female mitochondrial DNA (passed maternally) shows no such bottleneck. This means women kept reproducing across a much broader spectrum of lineages. The narrowing came from the top down, not the bottom up. Elite males reshaped the species by erasing vast swaths of it. A bit different from the civilizing / human self-domestication story you hear, isn’t it? The nicer people in the cave cooperating to get rid of the bullies? That happened, but the majority of the domestication story isn’t there. It’s in shackles, pits of bodies, chastity belts, slave raids, human sacrifices, and all manner of horrors.

    And it changed everything.

    It disrupted ancestral balances…between empathy and assertiveness, “wildness” and restraint, autonomy and obedience. It’s not something interesting side note. It altered hormonal profiles, sexual dimorphism, and the developmental timing of traits like aggression and cooperation. Civilization didn’t just change how we live…it reprogrammed what we are.

    And it looks a fuck of a lot like animal domestication. Bottlenecks, Enclosures. Selection for traits that serve the system, not the organism.

    The domestication of plants, animals, and people has implications that, when not accounted for in just about every important conversation we have in just about every field, results in the biggest example of decontextualization I can think of. Not acknowledging the maladaptively high level of attenuation of the modern human when discussing psychology, anthropology, history, sustainability, etc….means solutions simply aren’t found. The entire thing becomes self-referential.

    We’re not aware of what we are. We’re a domesticated phenotype…biologically tamed, groomed to perform in systems of symbolic order, no matter how insane that order becomes. And we try to find solutions within those insane systems. Solutions to the systems themselves, within the rules of the systems. It’s dizzying.

    We’re still living in the domesticating system. We operate inside its psychological architecture. And we carry the genetic consequences of a civilizational edit that decided which kinds of men would carry forward, and which kinds wouldn’t.

    The modern man isn’t just a descendant of random survivors. He isn’t a product of “survival of the fittest.” He’s the product of selective obedience. He’s a creature designed (quite literally) to fit the cage.

  • The Genome in Chains

    Biomass: the total mass of biological material in a given space.

    I’ve always liked that concept. You hear it in permaculture a lot…this plant produces more biomass, ecosystem edges teem with it, generate biomass to regenerate a landscape, etc.

    Biomass is life, quantified.

    Sometimes I wonder if you could look at human genetic material the same way. Imagine the total weight of the human genome…billions of copies, stretching across continents and centuries…stacked like cordwood. What percentage of that mass, that genetic biomass, came from people who were free? Not politically free…biologically free. Emotionally free. Cognitively free…

    Not much.

    How much of the DNA currently in circulation came through bodies that were coerced, owned, bred, conscripted, suppressed, raped, or systematically tamed?

    My guess? Most of it.

    Let’s talk some bleak history.

    Chattel slavery wasn’t a one-off horror…it was a civilizational feature for thousands of years. From Sumer to Rome to the cotton fields of Georgia…it was a foundation.

    Female reproductive coercion…rape, forced breeding, marriage as transaction…was the norm.

    Serfdom, debt bondage, child labor…also not freak events. These were normal life for most people, for most of human civilization.

    Throw in conscription, arranged marriage, and forced settlement. All designed to control reproduction and to channel genes in service of a system (not the individual).

    And then there’s caste, colonization, and mass incarceration…all of which reshaped survival odds, mating patterns, and the filtering of traits.

    And when I ask, What made it into the gene pool? I’m not just asking about biology…I’m asking about systemic conditioning. Because the traits that made survival possible under the conditions I listed above…obedience, emotional detachment, suppression, tolerance for unreality/contradiction…got passed on. They had to. That traits that didn’t? Coherence. Sensitivity. “Wildness.” Embodied distress in response to insanity. These got culled. Not completely, but enough to shift the signal.

    Civilization is domestication…by volume. It tames populations. It edits the genome the same way it edits forests…selectively…for yield…for compliance.

    We’re left with a species that wears its captivity in its genes. Shaped by submission…adaptation to cages. A genome that might just be a palimpsest of captivity.

  • So what is “neurodivergence,” really?

    We know it isn’t a disorder.

    Based on everything we know about human self-domestication, it’s hard to argue with the theory that neurodivergence is a retention of traits that were less attenuated by domestication…preserved in pockets where selection for tameness (compliance, suppression, abstraction) was weaker or more variable. And that during times of civilizational incoherence (when systems break down, contradictions multiply, symbolic structures fail), less “domesticated” people seem to appear in greater numbers (despite always being there), or become more visible because the gap between civilization and reality widens, or finally start to make sense, because their traits are adaptive in collapse.

    Let’s build this…

    Domestication selects for neural crest attenuation (compliance, docility, symbolic fluency, sensory tolerance).

    But not all populations or individuals experienced this equally (geographic, cultural, environmental diversity produced pockets of lower attenuation…these groups retained more feedback sensitivity…emotional reactivity, moral alarm, sensory intensity, literalism).

    Civilization pathologizes these traits (labels them as autism, oppositional defiance, “hyper-sensitivity,” etc.).

    But during periods of systemic incoherence or collapse, these individuals become more noticeable. Their “maladaptive” traits now map reality more accurately. They begin to show up in number…not because they’re new, but because the system’s illusions are failing.

    Fast-forward to 2025, and you have an apparent “epidemic” of neurodivergence.

    The explanation seems simple to me. We have greater exposure to feedback-inverted environments, a reduced ability of symbolic systems to contain contradiction (literal minds become more visible), more diagnostic categories and more surveillance (capturing traits that were overlooked), and a spike in environmental toxicity and noise (which dysregulates people with low attenuation).

    We don’t fit civilization because we weren’t (as) shaped by its full domestication loop.

    Why the hell is this so controversial or offensive? Clearly, some dog breeds retain more wolf-like traits. Clearly, some animals resist captivity better than others. And clearly, some humans retain more ancestral (feedback-sensitive) traits. Why? There’s only one explanation…and it’s the same one that explains why any “minority” trait persists. Their lineages were less selected for it (tameness), or more recently disrupted from (feedback-rich) contexts.

    For fuck’s sake, neurodivergent traits aren’t “new conditions.” They’re old configurations that make sense, especially in systems that don’t.

    So, what’s next?

    In evolutionary biology, we have to challenge the assumption that domestication is purely beneficial or benign. We have to reinterpret human evolution not as progressive refinement, but as selection for attenuation. We have to connect neurodivergent traits to ancestral or undomesticated configurations (if you insist). And we have to invoke runaway selection, neural crest theory, and feedback-driven adaptation when we do it.

    In neuroscience and developmental biology, we have to leverage the neural crest hypothesis to explain multi-trait shifts in domesticated species. We have to run with the theory that neurotypical traits are a developmental cascade triggered by early suppression feedback responsiveness. And we have to embrace the fact that what we classify as “autism” or “ADHD” probably reflect less attenuation of limbic, sensory, or integrative functions.

    In anthropology and archaeology, we have to reframe the civilizing process not as moral evolution, but as feedback severance and systemic control. Otherwise, we’ll continue to idealize it and our endpoint will be collapse. Again. And again. We have to challenge the dominant narrative of the “agricultural revolution” and the idea that domestication was progress. We have to recognize the fact that cultural and cognitive diversity in prehistory was shaped by differential exposure to domestication pressure.

    In psychiatry and psychology (it’s hard to be nice here), we need to reinterpret diagnostic categories as misread adaptive traits in maladaptive systems. We need to frame neurodivergence as a mismatch with an incoherent system, not as dysfunction. We need to challenge (or just burn) assumptions about “normalcy” and “functionality” in the DSM framework. And we need to wipe the slate clean and open the floor to all questions regarding moral injury, masking, and performance pathology.

    In systems theory and cybernetics, we need to look at feedback inversion as the main civilizational process. We need to apply runaway selection and closed-loop dysfunction to human cognition and culture (as painful as that will be). And we need to define neurodivergent distress as diagnostic error signals in failing systems.

    In cognitive science (and philosophy of mind), we need to challenge predictive coding’s assumption that accuracy is the goal…it needs to be acknowledged that civilization selects for predictive stability over truth. We need to demonstrate the link between literalism and feedback sensitivity to uncompromised model updating. And, come on, we need to admit that what we call “neurodivergent” cognition is closer to epistemological integrity (reality).

    In collapse studies/political sciences, we need to recognize that what we call “civilization” consistently suppresses the very traits that can correct its course. We need to see that collapse isn’t an anomaly, but the endpoint of systemic feedback suppression. And we need to say this: “Neurodivergent people are early responders in this collapsing feedback loop we find ourselves in.”

  • Compliance vs. Resilence (to Incoherence)

    I know the civilizing process / civilized systems select for both…but are they really the same thing? Are they both forms of attenuation (of feedback sensitivity)?

    Compliance is the willingness / tendency to conform to external demands, rules, or expectations (regardless of your internal state or of the environmental logic). It’s a behavioral adaptation. Your behavior becomes externally guided, socially enforced. You’re rewarded for obedience, predictability, and following rules. The more compliant you are, the better you’ll function in hierarchal or symbolic systems. But this adaptation (necessarily) suppresses agency, spontaneity, and moral resistance. I think of compliance as a way to survive within incoherence, by submitting to its logic…even when it contradicts reality.

    Resilience to incoherence is a bit different. I see it as the ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance, sensory overwhelm, moral contradiction, or systemic absurdity (without breaking down). Unlike compliance, this is a cognitive/emotional adaptation that’s internalized over time. You get rewarded for emotional detachment (“thick skin”), optimism, and stability. This adaptation enables prolonged function under conditions that would distress a more sensitive person. But the the adaptation (becoming resilient) suppresses emotional fidelity, sensory reactivity, and ethical boundaries. Think of it as the dampening of error signals…it allows the dysfunctional systems you participate in to keep running even when they no longer map to reality.

    They both suggest selection for high attenuation (reduced capacity to detect, register, and act on biologically meaningful feedback). That includes sensory attenuation (tolerating noise, crowds), emotional attenuation (suppressing distress, grief, anger, empathy), moral attenuation (compromising truth for harmony or success), and relational attenuation (roleplay instead of reciprocity).

    So I see attenuation as being the core functional trait being selected for in civilization. Not intelligence, strength, or adaptability, but attenuation…especially in domains that would otherwise threaten systemic continuity. That’s the falsifiable hypothesis I’m running with. That civilization (as both a process and a system) is runaway selection for attenuation.

    But attenuation is relative, isn’t it? I can’t say something is “attenuated” without specifying what signal or input has been diminished, and relative to what baseline/context.

    So in the context of domestication/civilization…what signals are being attenuated (and compared to what prior or natural baseline)? I listed some above and I keep adding more.

    Again, it’s not that “civilized” or “neurotypical” people are less capable in general. But we need to acknowledge that they’ve been conditioned (or selected) to attenuate very specific categories of feedback (categories that threaten the coherence of symbolic, hierarchal, or artificial systems they depend on). It isn’t hard to see when you think of how and why we domesticate animals…attenuation is the system’s way of silencing disruptive signals (and only “adaptive” in relation to a system in which truth is inconvenient).

  • Is there such thing as a “baseline human?”

    I describe the configuration of the human nervous system known as “neurotypical” as being divergent from an adaptive baseline. But is there such thing as a “baseline” human? A “baseline” wolf? After all, every organism is the result of ongoing evolution. Am I just comparing one phase of adaptation to another?

    If I were talking about evolutionary drift, or ecological selection within an intact system, then yes…I’d be fucking up. But the civilizing / domesticating process isn’t that.

    Domestication is artificial selection, not natural selection. In wild systems, traits are selected by feedback…what works, persists. In domesticated systems, traits are selected by suppression…what submits, survives. That’s a forced bottleneck, not an evolutionary trajectory. A wolf doesn’t become a dog by evolving, but by being confined, starved, bred, and rewarded into compliance. Same with us.

    And I’m comparing different conditions, not forms. This isn’t wolf vs. dog, or Paleolithic vs. modern human…it’s organism regulated by coherent feedback loops vs. organism surviving in a distorted, feedback-inverted environment. This isn’t some kind of nostalgia for prehistory…it’s about system integrity.

    It’s laughable that we live in a “world” where we have to be reminded that there is a functional baseline…you could call it feedback coherence, I guess. Coherent behavior is maintained through timely, proportionate, meaningful feedback. That’s the baseline…it’s a system condition (not a species). When a system becomes functionally closed, symbolically governed, and/or predictively trapped, it loses that baseline (even if it survives in the short term).

    You might respond that evolution got us here. But evolutionary processes don’t “justify” maladaptive systems. Saying there’s no baseline is a post hoc rationalization for harm. And I hear that all the time. People justifying obesity in dogs because it’s common in the breed. Or calling office work “adaptive” because it pays well. Or saying modern humans are just “evolved” for abstraction and control…even as the world burns and mental illness becomes the new norm.

    Evolution doesn’t care about health or coherence. It simply tracks what survives. But feedback is what sustains life, and it’s being severed.

    Ask yourself: what is selected for in society, as you know it? If you had to name one thing? Honesty? Hard work? Ambition?

    I think it’s compliance. I think the civilizing/domesticating process replaces selection for survival with selection for compliance.

    Let’s look at wild systems first. There, the selection pressure is for ecological coherence. Traits are favored because they enhance survival in a feedback-rich environment (keen senses, strong affective bonds, situational learning, pattern recognition, adaptability). An organism has to remain in sync with reality, or it dies.

    But in civilized systems, it’s easy to see that traits are favored because they enable success within an artificial, abstracted system (obedience, rule-following, role performance, suppression of emotion and instinct). You have to fit the symbolic structure, or you’re punished, excluded, pathologized, or discarded.

    It sucks because what was adaptive (sensitivity, integrity, etc.) is maladaptive in this odd place we call “civilization.” And what was dangerous (passivity, abstraction, dissociation) is rewarded.

    Think: selecting for people who can function without reality (instead of people who thrive in it).

    It’s not far fetched. At all. Sickly animals that can’t survive in the wild. Office workers who ignore chronic pain and emotional numbness (and get promoted). An entire species driving itself toward collapse while calling it “progress.”

    This whole trainwreck we’re on is a case of runaway selection, but instead of selecting for extravagant traits like peacock feathers, it selects for compliance with abstraction and resilience to incoherence. And like all runaway selection processes, it becomes self-reinforcing, decoupled from reality, and ultimately self-destructive.

    Don’t believe me? Let’s track it.

    Quick review of the basic concept. In biology, runaway selection occurs when a trait is favored so intensely within a closed feedback loop (e.g. mate choice, social signaling) that it amplifies beyond functional limits (it doesn’t serve survival anymore…it just signals compatibility with the system).

    Peacocks grow huge, draggy tails because other peacocks think it means they’re fit (not because it helps them survive). Humans undergo surgeries, wear restrictive clothes, or starve themselves for “attractiveness” under runaway cultural ideals. Same dynamic. And civilizations grow more complex, abstract, and self-referential not because it’s sustainable, but because “Complexity” signals legitimacy and control.

    Let’s run through it again.

    Civilization creates a system (think classrooms, corporations, governments) where success depends on suppressing natural feedback. Then it rewards those most tolerant of abstraction, delay, hierarchy, and contradiction. This filters out feedback-sensitive traits. That keeps happening until the system becomes so self-referential that it can’t correct course anymore…it’s bred out the ability to perceive correction.

    So it’s a runaway selection for dissociation. For the kind of human who can survive it (even if it clearly can’t survive the world).

    Like all runaway systems, the trait (in this case, compliance) accumulates beyond adaptive range. The system grows more fragile and less correctable. Feedback from the real world becomes too painful or too late. And collapse happens from the inability to stop succeeding at being disconnected (not from a single failure).

    We’re not evolving.

    We’re overfitting. Civilization is a runaway selection loop for traits that thrive in unreality.

    And the “neurotypical” configuration is a collection of those traits. It’s not a neutral or natural norm…it’s a phenotypic outcome of this runaway selection.

    A configuration that is tolerant of contradiction (doesn’t break down where reality and narrative diverge). That is emotionally buffered (can perform even when distressed). That is low in sensory vigilance (can endure loud offices, artificial lights, social facades). That is socially adaptive (mirrors norms, infers expectations, suppresses authenticity). That complies with rules even when rules are nonsensical. That’s able to delay gratification, ignore bodily needs, and maintain appearances.

    I’m not saying these traits are bad per se…but I think we can all agree that they’re not the “baseline human.” They’re the domesticated phenotype, selected over generations to survive in systems where truth no longer matters.

    And, of course, the more a system rewards these traits, the more they proliferate (socially, genetically, culturally). It becomes harder for feedback-sensitive individuals to survive. Reality has to be increasingly suppressed to preserve the illusion of normalcy. Eventually, the only people who appear “well-adjusted” are the ones most disconnected from feedback…and the entire system becomes incapable of detecting its own failure. That’s the endpoint of runaway selection.

    I have a hard time with the dominant narrative…that the neurotypical profile is some kind of gold standard of human functioning. To me, it’s clearly the domesticated outcome of a system that rewards compliance (and “stability,” such as it is) over coherence or contact with reality.

    * When I say “neurotypical,” it’s not meant as some kind of medical category. I think of it as the cognitive-behavioral phenotype most rewarded by civilization (modern society, yes, but also throughout the history of civilization). I don’t see it as a person. Not every “neurotypical person” fits this mold. I’m almost certain no one fits it perfectly. I’m describing a directional pressure, not a binary condition. And it isn’t “bad.” It’s simply optimized for the wrong environment (one that destroys life). Neurotypicality isn’t unnatural…it’s civilizationally adaptive (in a system that’s maladaptive to life).

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • Is compounding error to blame?

    Maybe.

    Any group that seeks advantage needs a model of the world to interpret cause and effect. This is true post-Dunbar (when a group is made up of more than ~150 people). Once behavior depends on symbol, the group is no longer responding to the world directly, but to its model of the world (this is consistent with the predictive processing model of human behavior). So what matters now is model error (and what happens to it)…not truth.

    Do you treat predictive error as signal, or noise? This is the fracture.

    One group encounters contradiction, failure, discomfort, and says, “We misunderstood something.” They adjust their model.

    Another group encounters the same and says, “This isn’t a real error.” Their model is preserved and signal is suppressed. Then the compounding begins.

    Every time the world returns unexpected feedback and you refuse to update, you embed the error into the structure. You reframe the contradiction as a test, or anomaly, or enemy action (think Trump). You revise the interpretation of feedback, not the model itself. You build insulation layers to protect the model from reality.

    Each move makes the model more coherent internally, but less aligned with the world. The simulation becomes smoother and the fit becomes worse. And because each act of suppression makes the model harder to question next time, the cost of correction increases exponentially.

    What’s being “compounded,” exactly? Error, because each misfit is hidden rather than corrected. Confidence, because the model appears to keep “working” internally. Power, because the system selects for those who uphold the model. And fragility, because the longer the feedback is ignored, the harsher its return.

    This is how collapse becomes inevitable, not from evil or chaos, but from a feedback loop about feedback itself.

    Collapse begins the first time a group decides that a predictive error is not worth adjusting for. The cause is this treatment of error, and the decision to protect the model rather than let it break where it no longer fits.

    A man dances. It rains. It happens again. And again.

    He (and eventually the group) builds a model: “Dancing causes rain.”

    So far, this is rational…based on a perceived pattern. This is just pattern sensitivity, not delusion. Everyone does this. Animals do it too. The brain is a pattern detector, not a truth detector. No problem yet.

    Others begin to believe. The dancer is now “Rainbringer.” His status rises and the ritual becomes culturally encoded. It’s a model with structure. It’s a social artifact now, not just a belief. And still no collapse. This can all exist within feedback sensitivity if error remains possible to acknowledge.

    He dances and it doesn’t rain. Or it rains with no dance. The group now faces a contradiction between model (dance = rain) and feedback (it didn’t work). This is the first point of model failure, and it opens two paths.

    If the group treats the error as a signal, it says, “Hmm. Maybe the connection wasn’t causal. Maybe dancing helps, but doesn’t guarantee it. Maybe something else matters too…clouds, season, soil. Maybe we were wrong. The model updates. Maybe the ritual stays as a tradition, but it loses its literal power claim. Now the worldview remains tethered to feedback.

    If the group treats the error as noise, it says, “He mustn’t have danced correctly. Someone in the group was impure. The gods are angry about something else. Rain did come, it’s just coming later. Don’t question the Rainbringer.” The model is preserved. But now, additional structures must be created to explain away the contradiction. And those structures will have their own failures, requiring even more insulation. This is compounding error in action. The model survives at the cost of truth.

    So the arc has a curvature. In the first path, the model continues to reflect the world, even if imperfectly. In the second path, the model begins to simulate reality, and each new contradiction deepens the simulation.

    Eventually, rain becomes something that doesn’t just happen…it becomes something that has to be narrated. And the system becomes a feedback-sealed loop. Until the drought is too long, belief no longer sustains coherence, and collapse forces the signal through.

    The divergence between sustainable worldview and collapsing worldview is not belief itself. It’s how the group responds when the pattern breaks.

    But why does one group treat error as signal, and another as noise? What’s the difference between the two?

    Is it in the quality of a group’s pattern detection? Maybe. But both groups saw a pattern where one didn’t exist. That’s normal…it’s how learning starts. So pattern detection alone doesn’t explain the difference. It might influence the likelihood of correction, but not the structural response to error. Everyone sees false patterns, but not everyone protects them.

    Is it how long the pattern appears to work? Maybe. The longer a pattern appears to be true, the higher the social and symbolic cost of abandoning it. If the rain-dancer’s model “works” for 20 years before failing, the group’s going to have a hell of a time letting go of it. It’s now embedded in ritual, hierarchy, identity, morality, and possibly even infrastructure. So when error comes, it’s no longer a mere contradiction, but a threat to the entire structure. The longer false coherence holds, the more catastrophic its loss becomes. Still, this is a compounding factor, not the root cause.

    Is it a group’s tolerance for uncertainty? This feels closer. Some groups may be more willing to live inside ambiguity…to say, “Maybe we don’t know.” Others require certainty, especially when power, identity, or survival are at stake. When uncertainty is seen as dangerous, contradiction is repressed. But even this is downstream of a deeper variable.

    So what’s the root difference?

    I’d say it has something to do with the group’s willingness to let its model break. In other words, a group’s relationship to truth. Some sort of functional truth orientation…a cultural posture that says: “Our model exists to serve reality, not the other way around. We are allowed to be wrong. The map is not the territory.”

    Groups that survive over time have ritualized humility at the model level. They embed model-breakability into the structure and build a bit of slack around belief. Maybe collapse becomes inevitable when belief becomes non-negotiable. When a group treats its model as the world itself instead of something that’s subordinate to the world.

    And none of that word salad comes even close to satisfying me. I still can’t locate the inherent difference in people that would explain why a group would choose fictions over reality…fictions that lead to destruction.

    Even when we level the playing field…no genetic difference, a shared environment, same cognitive equipment, same feedback events…one groups loosens its grip when the model breaks, and the other tightens that. It feels like a difference that came from nowhere, and my brain doesn’t tolerate that well. I want a mechanism.

    I’m not willing to say, “Some people are just wiser.” Or, “Some cultures are born better.” And definitely not, “Some mystical essence preserved them.” It’s lazy and just names the difference instead of explaining it. And it’s not agriculture. Or symbolic thought. Or state-formation. Or a very precise list of environmental conditions at a very precise time. I’ve thought these through for months, and I just don’t see it.

    Maybe the difference isn’t in the people, but in the first error and how it interacts with attention.

    Let’s go back to the dancer.

    Two groups experience the same failed rain-dance. The only difference is in one group, someone notices and the group listens. In the other group, the same doubt arises…but it’s silenced, ignored, or never spoken. The system begins to shape attention instead of truth. Maybe.

    If this were true, we could say that the divergence doesn’t begin with different kinds of people. It begins with different positions within the social system…or different degrees of attentional slack. Small variations in who’s allowed to speak, who’s believed, how disagreement is treated, and how closely someone is still tracking the world (hunters, children, women, outsiders) can determine whether the group detects error when it first appears. Maybe it’s the structure that lets signal in (or doesn’t).

    But I don’t buy it. I think it comes close (it does have something to do with WHO is listened to)…but the structural argument feels too top-heavy. Too contrived. It’s something about the people. It has to be.

    And I keep coming back to that silly rain dance example.

    “Oh, he moved his left leg differently last time. The dance is off this time. That must be why the rain isn’t coming.” Is this where it begins? With compounding error? A first act of model preservation over model revision?

    It’s like an inoculation against contradiction. The dancer failed to bring rain, and instead of letting the model break, the group makes a seemingly reasonable micro-adjustment that preserves its frame. But it proves to be anything but reasonable. It’s the beginning of something else entirely.

    Because it says, “The model is still valid. The error lies in execution…not in assumption.” I think that distinction is everything. Because once you decide the model must be true, every contradiction becomes a problem to explain away, not learn from. You start adjusting the dancer’s position, the timing, the offerings, the purity of the audience, the phase of the moon, the moral status of dissenters. Each change adds complexity without re-examining the core claim…each layer distances you further from reality and makes it harder to walk back.

    The “left-leg hypothesis” might feel like a natural progression of curiosity…but I don’t think it is. Because it isn’t asking, “What’s true?” It’s asking, “How can we keep the model intact?” And that’s compounding error in its earliest, most innocent form. It starts as protective curiosity, evolves into explanatory gymnastics, and ends in systemic delusion. In constantly mowing 40,000,000 acres of grass for no sane reason.

    It’s a wall that begins…error becomes a problem to solve inside the model, a threat to those who challenge it, and a signal no longer heard. And eventually you’re living in reference only to the model (the dance, the roles, the rituals, the scapegoats) while the sky goes dry. “He moved his leg wrong. And so began the drought.”

  • Is abstraction to blame?

    Let’s make some assumptions. Let’s assume that, at the outset, there are no genetic factors significant enough to account for one entire group’s remaining connected to its environment and another choosing disconnection. Let’s assume that individuals (and groups) will seek advantage where they can find (or create) it. Let’s assume that Dunbar’s number is a hard limit (~150 people). Scale beyond that demands abstraction. Let’s assume “worldviews” emerge to maintain cohesion of groups beyond 150 people. Let’s assume worldviews exist on a spectrum of fidelity to the world…some more grounded, others more distorted. And let’s assume that collapse risk increases as worldview diverges from world…an inverse correlation between realism and resilience. Let’s do our best to let go of our “civilization vs. tribe” bias and see the whole thing as feedback fidelity across scale.

    At ~150 individuals, a group’s relational coherence (previously maintained by direct sensory, ecological, and social feedback…fragments…prehistoric keyboard warriors appear). Shared stories start to replace shared experience. Symbols replace presence. And roles, laws, and systems emerge as prosthetics for lost immediacy. Now we have a fork: fidelity vs. simulation.

    The group with the high-fidelity worldview uses myth, ritual, and language to model the world as closely as possible. Symbols are tethered to reality, authority is distributed (and accountable to ecology and relational norms), growth is still limited by feedback and encoded in story, and abstraction is used with care and periodically re-grounded (e.g. vision quests, initiation, seasonal rituals). These are stories that serve to remind the group of how the world works.

    This group persists. Its worldview preserves adaptive behavior even at scale. They may never become “civilizations” in the classic sense, because they resist the abstraction that enables runaway scale.

    The group with the low-fidelity worldview uses abstraction to model desire, not the world. Symbols become detached from feedback…power, wealth, status grow by internal logic. Authority is centralized and increasingly self-referential. Growth is pursued independent of ecological context. And simulation becomes self-sustaining…a loop that no longer checks against the world. These are stories that tell the group it’s right, even when the world says otherwise.

    This group expands faster, but at the cost of delayed collapse (feedback). The tighter the internal simulation, the longer it can suppress reality…until reality returns with interest.

    And so this gives us a nice, simple predictive model: collapse is the repayment of feedback deferred by low-fidelity worldview. The greater the distortion, the greater the build-up, the harder the crash. You could almost graph it. Fidelity to reality on the X-axis and time to collapse on the Y-axis. And you’d see an inverse exponential curve.

    This model has falsifiable (testable) implications.

    If accurate, you should see that high-fidelity groups maintaining ecological balance over time, resisting large-scale empire formation, embedding taboos, rituals, and stories that enforce ecological or social limits, and being harder to conquer ideologically, but easier to conquer militarily. And we do see that, don’t we?

    If accurate, you should see that low-fidelity groups expanding rapidly and dominating others, delaying collapse through buffering, abstraction, and extraction, pathologizing feedback-sensitive individuals, and experiencing sudden systemic failure. And we see that as well, don’t we?

    If accurate, collapse events will often mark the point where simulation becomes completely unmoored from reality, and the return of feedback becomes catastrophic rather than adaptive. And this is exactly what we see in the dramatic phenomenon we call “the collapse of a great civilization,” as well as collapse events we feel around us every day in our own spectacularly unmoored simulation.

    What we arrive at isn’t just a description of how civilizations fall…it’s a redefinition of what scale itself demands. Scale isn’t the problem. The problem is simulation without feedback.

    Collapse isn’t inevitable because of size. It’s inevitable when scale is managed through simulation that suppresses reality. So the real challenge isn’t to reject abstraction (that’s here to stay)…it’s to embed continuous feedback into abstract systems. Otherwise, they’re on a one-way street to delusion.

    I can’t emphasize this enough: collapse isn’t moral or technological failure. It’s a delayed feedback event. It’s about worldview fidelity. Does a symbolic order track reality, or replace it?

  • Stability Versus “Progress”

    The romanticization of non-industrial or Indigenous cultures often assumes stability where there may be only earlier-stage (civilizational) dynamics. How do we know they weren’t just earlier on the same trajectory we find ourselves?

    I think some pre-civilizational or tribal groups may have been on a path toward scale and abstraction, had they continued to expand population, develop surplus, or centralize power. Not all small-scale societies are feedback-sensitive by virtue of size alone. Some were clearly stratifying, warring, or manipulating symbol in ways that hint at incipient feedback suppression. And, of course, some became empires later (e.g., early Mesopotamian groups, Olmecs, etc.).

    But many cultures we know of had explicit mechanisms that prevented the civilizational arc. This is where the evidence gets stronger. They deliberately resisted complexity, centralization, and symbolic authority, not because they couldn’t develop them…they chose not to.

    The !Kung (San people of the Kalahari) have rich oral traditions that ridicule arrogance, prevent hoarding, and maintain egalitarian relations through ritualized teasing and sharing.

    Pacific Northwest tribes had complex seasonal systems with embedded limits on harvesting, enforced through taboo and storytelling.

    The Inuit use humor, social cues, and distributed authority to manage conflict and maintain decentralized power, despite extreme environments.

    James C. Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed” documents upland Southeast Asian groups who fled state formation intentionally, preserving social structures that avoided hierarchy.

    Amazonian and Andean cultures often shaped their environments intelligently (terra preta, agroforestry) without triggering runaway scale or ecological collapse, suggesting long-term feedback awareness (connection).

    These are groups with institutionalized feedback preservation…culture as ecosystem maintenance, not system expansion. What’s often identified as a failure to progress (toward the trainwreck we’re on) was an active refusal.

    Some paths were clearly tried, then rejected. Archaeological evidence suggests that not all large-scale or symbol-rich societies escalated into collapse scenarios. Some collapsed gently or even walked back from the brink. The Hopewell culture in North America developed extensive trade and ritual networks, but later dispersed voluntarily, reverting to smaller, more localized systems. Catalhoyuk (in modern-day Turkey) was a large Neolithic settlement with no apparent hierarchy or centralized authority, sustained for over a millennium before dispersal. So the arc isn’t inevitable…it can plateau, regress, or reroute.

    In other places, the arc was forcibly interrupted. Many societies that appear “early-stage” were in fact stabilized systems interrupted by colonization. Their lifeways weren’t primitive…they were ecologically coherent. What ended them was an external force that did not follow the same feedback rules. Guns, germs, capital, extraction, Christian mission, symbolic domination. We have to be careful not to conflate “didn’t scale” with “was about to scale.” For some cultures, collapse wasn’t an imminent endpoint…it was something that arrived on ships.

    So, yeah, some groups were on the arc. But most actively resisted it through cultural structures that preserved feedback, suppressed hierarchy, and treated simulation as dangerous. Others collapsed gently, or dispersed consciously, not in chaos. And many were erased before their trajectory could be seen, by a system already deep in feedback severance.

    The civilizational arc is hardly a natural law…it’s a pattern. And patterns can be interrupted, redirected, or refused. But only if the culture wants to stay in contact with reality.

    But what allows some societies to stabilize? Is it internal design or external environmental limits? I think it’s both, but when stabilization succeeds, it’s the internal response to external limits that makes the difference.

    We can think of external conditions as constraints and enablers. They shape the playing field, but they don’t determine the moves.

    Environments that were abundant but not stockpiling-friendly (e.g. tropical forests, seasonal hunting zones) made it harder to hoard, centralize, or form coercive hierarchies. And without massive, storable grain surpluses (like wheat in Mesopotamia), there’s less incentive to control labor, enforce calendars, or invent gods who demand tithes. When nature feeds you just enough, but only if you listen to it…you stay in dialogue with it.

    Mountainous, jungle, or arctic environments often prevent large-scale coordination, empire-building, or rapid trade expansion. These conditions inhibit external conquest and select for small-group adaptability over centralized control.

    And where population density remained low for whatever reason (terrain, resources, cultural practices like long birth spacing), there was less pressure to intensify extraction or build coercive institutions. When there’s space to move, there’s space to stay sane.

    But none of these conditions guarantee stability. They just don’t force instability. Many societies had varying degrees of access to abundance, mobility, or knowledge, that might look familiar to us…and still chose a path of restraint. Why? How?

    Again, stability comes from institutionalizing restraint, feedback, and relational intelligence. It doesn’t come from being “primitive.”

    For example, taboos can act as a form of ecological governance. Many Indigenous societies embedded strict taboos around hunting, fishing, harvesting, or even speaking certain names or stories out of season. These aren’t “superstitions”–they’re feedback-preserving rituals, tied to real ecological signals. “Don’t fish this river in spring” framed as a spiritual belief may sound religious…until you realize that’s when the salmon spawn.

    Then we have the egalitarian social structures we see in most of these groups…something we have the hardest time wrapping our shrunken brains around. These were norms, myths, and practices that flattened power. Joking hierarchies, rotating leadership, gift economies. Leadership wasn’t rewarded with privilege but burdened with accountability. And prestige came from generosity, not control.

    And we tend to equate the myths of these groups as some childish version of our own religions. But there’s a key difference. Their rituals and stories were anchored in reality. Rather than simulate the world through myth, many oral cultures used story to maintain contact with place, kin, and feedback. Myth was a mnemonic ecology, not a symbolic escape hatch.

    Of course, the biological drive to seek advantage (assuming we accept that framing of it), is universal. This is where feedback-sensitive social sanctions come into play. Those who hoarded, abused, or disrupted balance were shamed, ridiculed, ostracized, or corrected…not pathologized, but realigned. Certainly not made president.

    What we see here is an active design of cultures that chose feedback over fantasy, limits over linear growth, and relationships over domination. They weren’t “stuck in time.” They were anchored in reality. And I think that’s the only cultural achievement worth pursuing: stabilization. Progress, the way we define it, has an unmistakable entropic flavor. In fact, in a very real sense, what we call “progress” is entropy.

  • Is civilization inevitable?

    Civilizations don’t collapse the same way they start, but the seeds of collapse are there from the beginning.

    A group finds a way to defer natural consequences by storing surplus, centralizing control, pushing ecological costs elsewhere, and inventing narratives that justify it all. There’s a perceived solution (to scarcity, conflict, unpredictability). But that solution involves suppressing or overriding immediate feedback from the environment or community.

    What begins as a trickle becomes a system. Civilization grows through abstraction (money, law, religion, bureaucracy), extraction (from land, people, animals, future), and simulation (symbolic authority replaces direct experience). These allow expansion…but only by removing consequences from perception. The forest is gone, but we import lumber. The soil is dead, but we buy fertilizer. The people are angry, but we broadcast unity.

    Eventually, the deferred feedback piles up. The buffers and simulations fail. Aquifers dry up, crops fail, and the dominant narrative becomes even more performative than usual. Collapse isn’t the reversal of civilization’s birth. It’s the reassertion all at once of real conditions that had been suppressed for generations. What was delayed arrives, compounded.

    So it begins with the severing of feedback loops and ends when those same loops snap back into place…violently, suddenly, and usually too late to adapt. You might ignore the soil for 300 years…but not for 301.

    And whereas the rise of a civilization is cumulative and self-congratulatory, its collapse is rapid, cascading, and disorienting. Because civilized systems depend on delayed feedback, they can’t detect failure until it’s already terminal. The signals that might have saved the group were suppressed by the system. Not incidentally…the civilizing process IS suppression. It can’t be tweaked or repurposed.

    The conventional view is that civilizations rise because of progress (agriculture, technology, governance, and trade). They bring order to chaos, domesticate nature, and elevate humanity. They fall due to external shocks (invasion, drought, plague) or internal corruption (moral decay, bad leadership, inequality). Their collapse is usually portrayed as a breakdown of order, requiring some sort of reform. This is a linear, human-centric narrative…civilization as a heroic ascent occasionally interrupted by tragedy.

    But civilization clearly doesn’t emerge from progress. It emerges from disconnection…a break from ecological and social feedback loops. It thrives by delaying, distorting, or outsourcing consequences. It doesn’t solve problems. It manages perception and concentrates control. And collapse isn’t a fluke…it’s the logical outcome of the system’s internal logic reaching its thermodynamic and informational limits. Not bad luck or bad people, but a system that treats feedback as an externality.

    What do you believe? That the most advanced societies in history collapsed by accident? That despite their power, intelligence, and complexity, they simply had some unfortunate lapse in judgment? In mismanaging resources? By ignoring obvious problems? By overreaching a little? And, oops!, collapsed? And that we’re smarter now? More self aware and made better by the lessons of history? Let’s think about that.

    The idea that civilizations “accidentally” overshoot, centralize too much power, or destroy their ecologies…every…single…time…is absurd, unless that pattern is intrinsic. If every plan crashes after 300 kilometers, you don’t need better pilots, you need a new kind of plane. But the civilizational narrative blames the pilot. Every time.

    Blaming barbarians, climate, disease, natural disaster, or Donald Trump ignores that systems capable of adaptation should adapt. Resilient systems bend…only brittle ones break. So if collapse keeps happening, the system simply isn’t resilient. It’s designed to avoid adaptation until it’s too late. We use our intelligence to formulate brilliant ways of resisting feedback. But resisting feedback is suicidal.

    The conventional story of civilization is weirdly moralistic. Rome fell because of decadence. Egypt succumbed to opportunistic invaders. But we’re exceptional and immune? It’s a childish blurring of causality with character, turning collapse into some sort of cautionary tale rather than a systems failure. They bad / we good.

    If collapse is a repeated outcome across cultures, time periods, continents, and resource bases, it’s not an exception. It’s a rule. Look at actual system, this process we call “civilization”…not the environment. Not leaders. Not outliers. Not comforting nonsense.

    Forget you even know the word “civilization” for a moment. You just have a pattern. What is that pattern?

    A group discovers how to buffer feedback. They find a way to delay or distort the natural consequences of their actions. Storing food beyond the season. Building structures to insulate from climate. Using tools or fire to override bodily limits. Creating language or ritual to manage fear and uncertainty. It feels like control and progress.

    Then they scale the buffer. More buffering means more predictability. Population growth, specialization, hierarchy. But the buffers aren’t neutral…they begin to shape the system. Authority centralizes, roles solidify, and the environment is seen as raw material instead of relationship.

    Symbolic structures replace direct experience. Land is replaced by maps, relationships by law, patterns by gods, and functionality by performance and titles. People start responding to the simulation rather than the world.

    People who remain sensitive to real feedback are suppressed. If you can’t ignore real signals, question too much, or resist simulation, you’re sidelined (at best). Deviant. Sick. Subversive. Disposable. A system of feedback suppression enforces coherence by silencing signal. Sensitivity is a threat to its structure.

    Consequences accumulate outside awareness. The environment is sucked dry and so is social cohesion. But warning signs are noise. Reaction is blamed. If you suffer, the problem is you.

    Reality reasserts itself when accumulated feedback overwhelms the civilized system’s capacity to manage it. And that’s all collapse is…it’s the return of feedback.

    Is this pattern inevitable? This particular (and exceptional) form of human stupidity? Maybe not, but it’s highly probably under certain conditions.

    The impulse to buffer feedback is natural…all organisms buffer. A bear builds fat before winter. A bird builds a nest. A human puts on a raincoat. That’s adaptive buffering. That’s survival in a fluctuating world. But buffering becomes dangerous when it’s no longer a response to feedback, but a way to avoid it. Less “how do I stay warm?” and more “how do I avoid ever feeling cold again?”

    Once buffering becomes centralized and scaled, surplus becomes status, control becomes virtue, symbols become sacred, and feedback becomes a threat. At that point, the system protects itself instead of life. Any signal that challenges its narrative is neutralized, pathologized, or hidden.

    But there are cultures, both historical and current, that didn’t follow this path. Where feedback is revered (through ecology, ritual, and story), where people live with limits, and where lifeways use buffering as a temporary strategy, not an overarching structure. It’s about constant relationship with feedback and avoiding permanent insulation.

    But in what we call modern systems, the pattern is inevitable. Because now we’ve added fossil fuels (infinite buffering, for a while), digital simulation (infinite symbol manipulation), globalization (outsourcing all consequences), institutions that treat feedback as failure, and a cultural narrative that equates comfort with success. At this level of complexity and detachment, feedback has no way in except collapse.

  • Dominoes

    The whole fucking thing comes down to feedback. Unmediated feedback. The kind you can’t spin, delay, or edit. When an organism senses the world clearly, it can adjust, survive, and thrive. But once you drop a layer between the organism and reality (call it language, ideology, bureaucracy, or just plain bullshit), you’re on borrowed time. Eventually, something breaks.

    For most people, the break is delayed. Their nervous systems are better at ignoring subtle signals, overlooking contradictions, smiling politely at insanity. But not everyone is built that way. Some of us (call it autism, ADHD, or whatever label feels comfortable) are wired to notice when reality no longer makes sense. We register the noise, the contradictions, the meaningless loops, and we can’t just ignore them. Our bodies won’t allow it. So we start to collapse. And what gets diagnosed as pathology is a nervous system screaming that the feedback loop is broken.

    From the very beginning (even in the womb), this sensitivity registers environmental incoherence. Prenatal studies show clear links between maternal stress, inflammation, and immune activation and later diagnoses of autism. Does sensitivity emerge as the fetus adapts to distorted biochemical signals? Other evidence points to differences in fetal movements, heightened responsiveness to sensory input, and physiological issues present from birth…feeding difficulties, gastrointestinal problems, connective-tissue disorders. Are what clinical medicine calls “comorbidities” (conditions like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, POTS, immune dysregulation) actually somatic reverberations of a system built to sense and react vividly to its environment? Are they dysfunctions? Or the body’s early protests against misalignment?

    My whole life’s been an exercise in adaptive mimicry, tracking the subtle shifts in other people’s expectations, moods, and preferences, adjusting my accent, my mannerisms, even my damn opinions…not out of manipulation but from an inescapable instinct to stabilize the feedback loop. Coral reefs do it. They adjust constantly, subtly, responding to every tiny environmental shift. Every feedback-sensitive form of life does it. And when we see it in “nature” (reality), we celebrate it as symbiosis. But in humans, it’s dismissed as social mimicry or conflated with other strategies to mesh with incoherent systems…masking, people-pleasing, and others. We pathologize the sensitivity instead of questioning why the environment is so hostile to genuine responsiveness.

    This isn’t personal. It’s structural. Civilization runs on simulation. It replaces direct, responsive feedback with symbols (money, status, language) and treats those symbols as reality. Dominance, transient and responsive in the natural world, becomes permanent and unquestionable. Submission signals, which in other animals lead to de-escalation and mutual benefit, become invitations to exploitation in humans because power has become abstracted, detached from consequence.

    These truths surface in our art and entertainment. The nonverbal humans in Planet of the Apes (especially in the reboot trilogy) aren’t primitive or diseased. They’re people who’ve fallen out of the symbolic order. They’ve stopped simulating. They’ve lost their language, their narrative, their ability to pretend. And that terrifies the verbal humans, who see this not as honesty…but as infection. RFK Jr. and those like him talk about an autism epidemic. They’re terrified of the collapse of the simulation. They’re terrified of feedback-sensitive bodies that can’t pretend anymore.

    There’s a brutal, beautiful irony here. Wherever civilization diagnoses autism, it diagnoses itself. Wherever it diagnoses ADHD, it diagnoses itself. These are biological signals registering polluted feedback loops that we’ve all been forced to accept.

    Life doesn’t survive the civilizing process. It never has. Indigenous people in deep relationship with the land? Gone. Coral reefs? Bleached ghost towns. Rainforests? Razed for palm oil and burgers. Every morning, 150 fewer species wake up. Civilization spreads across the Earth knocking over every form of life in its path, starting with the most deeply rooted in reality and working its way up the chain. Like a row of dominoes, the more connected you are to the truth of the world, the sooner you fall.

  • Premises

    1. Life depends on feedback. Touch a hot stove, you pull your hand back. Miss a meal, your stomach growls. That’s the cost of staying alive. No feedback, no adjustment. No adjustment, no survival.
    2. Coherent systems return meaningful feedback. The message gets back to you…fast, clear, and close to the source. Late, vague, or secondhand? That’s not feedback. That’s noise.
    3. Feedback sensitivity is a life strategy. The sooner you feel the shift, the sooner you adjust. Birds don’t wait to see flames…they leave the forest when the smoke changes. That’s how they survive. And if others are paying attention, that’s how they survive too.
    4. Feedback sensitivity is adaptive…except in systems that stop listening. In coherent environments, early response keeps things from falling apart. In incoherent ones, the early responder looks like the problem. Coral reefs bleach faster than open oceans. Sensitive species die off before generalists. The ones that feel first go first—not because they’re weak, but because they’re on time.
    5. Civilization is a recurring failure mode. In this book, it doesn’t refer to a culture, a stage, a place, or a people. It’s not a noun. It’s a verb-process, like pacificATION, colonizATION, industrializATION. CivilizATION is what happens when feedback loops are systematically severed. It doesn’t start with malice. It starts with a simple desire to feel safer, more stable, more in control. It is a systemic overlay that offers short-term solutions to risk, discomfort, and unpredictability—by replacing feedback with control. Over time, that control becomes structure. The structure becomes ideology. And pretty soon, you’re draining rivers to grow cotton in the desert. The system begins to preserve itself at the expense of the reality it was meant to navigate.
    6. Civilization sustains unsustainable behavior by muting the alarms. It silences the very signals that would restore balance. The soil thins, the insects vanish, the forests catch fire…but you still get strawberries in February. Grievance is branded as incivility. Burnout as poor performance. Illness as mindset. As long as it looks fine from a distance, the system says, “Carry on.”
    7. Civilization replaces feedback with simulation. It doesn’t listen…it models. It swaps real signals for proxies: dashboards instead of dirt, sentiment scores instead of rage, GDP instead of wellbeing. The field is dry, but the chart looks good. The hunger is real, but the algorithm says engagement is up. The system isn’t responding to life anymore…it’s managing a story about itself.
    8. Power concentrates where feedback can’t reach. Without constraints, influence flows toward those who are least responsive to consequence. Oil execs don’t drink from poisoned rivers. Tech billionaires don’t live by the cobalt mines.
    9. Systems reward what they need to survive. Civilization needs denial, so it promotes the people best at it. The ones insulated from the heat, from the alarm, from the sound of coughing. Empathy doesn’t scale here. Disconnection does. Power concentrates in feedback-insensitive actors. CEOs who can’t answer a question and leaders who can’t finish a sentence…and still win. Here, insensitivity to consequence looks like advantage. Confidence untethered from accuracy looks like competence. Detachment from ecological and emotional reality looks like strength. The less you notice, the farther you go.
    10. Civilization doesn’t care who builds it. It doesn’t care what you believe, what you promise, or what flag you fly. Power concentrates anywhere feedback is severed. The pattern repeats across time, across geography, and across ideologies. This isn’t a capitalism problem. It isn’t a Western problem. It’s a systems problem. Socialist dreams turn authoritarian. Forest tribes become human-sacrificing empires. The Age of Reason ends with Donald Trump. Good intentions don’t stop it. Neither do labels, revolutions, or reforms. When systems stop responding to signals, they start rewarding those who can operate without them. Power doesn’t corrupt…it collects where correction can’t reach.
    11. Collapse is a positive feedback loop. Every missed signal makes the next one easier to ignore. Like turning up the music to drown out that weird noise your car’s been making. Like watching a field fail year after year and blaming the weather…while doubling down on herbicides. The more insulated you are, the more in control you feel…right up to the moment the wheels come off.
    12. The sensitive fall first. We break down in response to signals others no longer perceive. We scream or cry at the news while everyone else shrugs and scrolls. We burn out while they call it “business as usual.” But our suffering is timely, not excessive.
    13. Our breakdown gets framed as the problem. Systems that depend on silence treat sensitivity as a threat. Call out harm? We’re unstable. Refuse to adapt? We’re defiant. Break down? We’re disordered. Say it’s too loud to think? We have attention issues. Easier to medicate signals than fix systems.
    14. Try to bring feedback back in, and the system pushes you out. Telling the truth is disruptive. Showing distress is personal failure. Refusing to play along is insubordination. Whistle blowers are prosecuted. Protestors are kettled. Burnout is a performance issue. The system’s fine with collapse…unless you name it out loud.
    15. In polite systems, feedback doesn’t get crushed…it’s ignored with a smirk. We’re not punished, we’re “too intense.” We’re not silenced, we’re just “not a good fit.” Say something real and we’re laughed at, labeled unstable, dramatic, extremist, naïve. We’re reduced to identity (“just a kid,” “just a woman,” just autistic,” “just rationalizing failure”) and treated as if we’re making people uncomfortable, not making sense. Greta stood in front of the UN, said exactly what needed to be said, and got turned into a punchline. If we can’t be diagnosed, we’re mocked. If we can’t be mocked, we’re ghosted. In systems built on image, truth is just bad optics.
    16. As civilization increasingly rewards disconnection, the more power flows to the least sensitive. This is part of collapse’s positive feedback loop. The people rising to the top of institutions are those least responsive to feedback, while the people most responsive to it are burning out in classrooms, boardrooms, and waiting rooms. One side gets elected. The other gets diagnosed. It’s not just misfit…it’s systemic inversion. The people who feel what’s wrong are told that feeling is the problem. We’re difficult. We’re rigid.
    17. The sensitive don’t go numb. Not because we’re defiant, but because we’re still connected. Neurologically. Physically. Emotionally. What looks like defiance is just coherence in a system that can’t tolerate it. But we’re not rebelling. We’re responding.
    18. To survive, we’re asked to suppress our perception. Masking, burnout, and self-ostracization become survival strategies. Not for thriving, but for staying tolerable to others. We start to believe that the problem is us. The traffic isn’t too loud to think, after all. I’m just difficult. The flickering fluorescent lights aren’t too bright, after all. I’m just too sensitive. As systems drift further from reality, so does the gap between what we feel and what we’re told. That gap has a name. It’s called suffering.
    19. Our suffering is the last internal signal the system still returns. When all other loops are broken, our distress is the only thing left telling the truth. Exhaustion means stop…not toughen up. Lies mean not-truth…not colors. But the system calls it a malfunction.
    20. The system can’t hear us. It reads accuracy as instability. Refusal as defiance. Collapse as personal failure. It doesn’t register signal…only disruption.
    21. Collapse isn’t sudden. It’s the final message from every signal the system refused. Every warning mocked. Every breakdown misread. Every truth sidelined. Dry wells. The teacher who quits mid-year. The kid who stops talking. They weren’t disruptions…they were course corrections. Collapse is the feedback that happens when you silence all the others.
    22. What the system calls dysfunction is often diagnostic. Autistic shutdown in a world of meaningless activity. ADHD “hyper”activity in environments devoid of species-appropriate novelty. “Pathological demand avoidance” in the face of relentless, arbitrary demands. “Hyper” fixation in a culture that interrupts everything. “Rigidity” in a world cut off from natural cycles. These labels don’t describe us. They describe conditions. Conditions that no longer support life.
    23. Collapse is never a glitch. It’s the return of feedback in force. What got silenced comes back louder. What got ignored shows up everywhere.
    24. Our distress isn’t a flaw. It is the cost of staying real in a system that rewards denial. Not by choice, but by the configuration of our nervous systems.
    25. Civilization unfolds as an amplifying oscillation between feedback severance and forced return. Pick up a history book. Each time it suppresses feedback, the eventual correction comes with more force, more velocity, less predictability. Like pushing little Timmy on the swing: each shove sends him higher, and each return is faster, harder to catch, more dangerous to stop. Each push moves the system further from coherence, until collapse is not a break, but a long-overdue arc completing itself.

    “Life depends on feedback.”

  • Civilization as a Process

    I’ll try to sell you on my redefinition of “civilization.”

    I don’t use the word to mean culture, or cities, or institutions (per se), or human flourishing. I use it more like a verb-process—like pacification, colonization, industrialization. Something directional, something that happens to people and places, rather than something they just are.

    It’s a pattern.

    To me, it’s what emerges when a group starts suppressing feedback loops…not necessarily out of malice…out of a desire to feel safer, more stable, more in control. It starts with buffering risk, avoiding discomfort, stretching growth, the usual. And at first, those choices help. Of course they do. They solve short-term problems. But the structure that builds around those solutions eventually starts to depend on not feeling.

    The system grows by keeping certain signals out. Overriding ecological cues, social tension, moral contradiction, bodily distress. The more successful it is at doing that, the more vulnerable it becomes when feedback inevitably returns.

    Whether through collapse, revolt, exhaustion, or ecological breakdown…whatever was suppressed / severed doesn’t disappear. It just builds up behind the dam. You see this clearly in human-driven desertification, for example, but also pretty much ANYWHERE this “civilization” process tends to wander (including in your own body…not listening to signals long enough and having that feedback return all at once as cancer, diabetes, etc.).

    So the pattern becomes this kind of oscillation: first, the severing of feedback, then the return of that feedback in the form of collapse. Then the rebuilding (new tools, new methods, maybe even new ideals), but the same structure at the core…suppress the signal, preserve the behavior.

    Each cycle gets a little more elaborate. A little more buffered. A little more ambitious. Of course it does. It’s able to build on the previous iteration’s feedback severances. Rome builds all kinds of cool shit. Rome collapses. But we don’t need to reinvent its successes. We pick up where it left off.

    When it breaks, it breaks harder. Every time. Because the feedback loops that were broken were bigger ones. More crucial ones. And they were severed for longer. More effectively.

    It’s not a linear rise-and-fall story. It’s more like an amplifying spiral…same pattern, but each swing goes wider, each crash digs deeper. Pushing a kid on a swing….every push goes higher, is a little easier, and comes back stronger.

    That’s why I don’t see “civilization” as the inevitable endpoint of human social evolution. It’s not the natural form of scaled human life. It’s just one possible configuration. But it’s the one we’re in, which makes it bloody hard to question. I think it was Shaw who said patriotism is believing your country is the best because you were born in it? Civilization as the best (or the only) because you’re in it. Presentism, or something.

    There are other ways groups can grow. Other ways people can organize complexity. Obviously. Every group in history that lived adaptively but wasn’t part of this process I’m talking about is saying “duh” from the pages of old books and in the oral traditions of their descendants. Ways that don’t require suppressing sensation, displacing consequence, or overriding the living world.

    This process….this civilizATION process…isn’t the default. No one I know would actually do the things they let civilization do for them, not with their own hands. So this pattern/process is a divergence. And any living thing still sensitive to real feedback becomes a divergence to IT. Necessarily. And the more it diverges from feedback, the more of those living things seem divergent within it. But they didn’t diverge. It did. Christ, I really managed to make that confusing, didn’t I? It’s late.

    Anyways, if you can start to see civ that way…not as some culmination of humanity, but as a particular coping mechanism that’s gotten out of hand, it becomes a lot easier to realize its explanations for things like cognitive divergence are just….ass-backwards. It’s not somewhat contextual…it’s delusional. I don’t expect you to be convinced…I’m still developing the language for this (and the ideas themselves, frankly). But think on it, maybe. Test it. I walk around seeing feedback loops now…where they’re broken, why, and what and who that affects.