The First to Fall

Tag: spirituality

  • Was Hobbes right? (and other holes in Wrangham’s narrative)

    Wrangham’s reading becomes “Hobbesian” only if I treat modern Homo sapiens as a transparent example of “what nature does.” But if I see most modern humans as the outcome of a runaway selection process (which I do), then what he’s describing isn’t “the natural course of things”…it’s one very peculiar path, shaped by group-enforced control, ecological shocks, and self-reinforcing dynamics.

    In Wrangham’s frame, humans reduced reactive aggression “naturally,” like bonobos, by killing off bullies. This made us more cooperative and domesticated, enabling civilization. This makes our docility some kind of moral progress…proof of “better angels.”

    But when we look at this as runaway selection, we see that humans reduced disruptive reactivity not because it was inherently maladaptive, but because control systems selected against it. Those who resisted were killed, enslaved, or excluded, while compliant individuals reproduced. It wasn’t a noble trajectory toward peace. It’s a feedback loop of domestication…each round of control flattens diversity, narrows behavior, and strengthens the system’s grip.

    I propose that modern “cooperation” isn’t evidence of a gentle human nature, but of attenuation. A domesticated phenotype optimized for predictability. And what Wrangham calls “our success” is really a fragile state of overshoot. More docile humans and larger coordinated systems make for the massive ecological extraction we see today. Instead of Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish, and short” as the baseline, the baseline was probably messier but more adaptive…with greater tolerance for autonomy, variability, and feedback from the environment.

    I think the Hobbesian story is itself a product of domesticated minds narrating their condition as “progress” (I’m in full agreement with Christopher Ryan here). What looks like the triumph of peace is really the triumph of control which, taken far enough, undermines both autonomy and ecological survival.

    I want to take a second (third? fourth? tenth?) look at Wrangham’s take on reactive aggression now. Because there’s a lot about it that doesn’t sit comfortably with me.

    Reactive aggression (the “heat of the moment,” crimes of passion) is still recognized as human. It may be tragic or destructive, but the law often interprets it as impulsive, unplanned…an overflow of feeling. That makes it mitigating. Proactive aggression (premeditated, calculated), on the other hand, is seen as more dangerous. It reflects intentional control, not eruption. Society punishes it more harshly because it reveals a deliberate strategy of harm. This suggests (to me, anyway) that people intuitively grasp that reactivity is part of being alive, whereas proactive aggression is a sort of deviation…weaponizing intelligence for domination.

    Wrangham says that humans became “civilized” by suppressing reactive aggression. But I think everyone can agree that cultural practice indicates we still see reactive aggression as understandable, even forgivable. What we really can’t tolerate is schemed violence…the kind of proactive aggression that builds empires, executes slaves, or engineers genocide. I think the very logic of law undermines Wrangham’s claim. If reactive aggression were the great evolutionary danger, why is it less punished than the thing he ways persisted unchanged?

    Which brings me back to the better explanatory model…domestication didn’t simply reduce hot tempers. It systematically removed resistance (any kind of reactivity that disrupts control). But at the same time, it rewarded (and still rewards) the forms of aggression that can operate through the system…planned, symbolically justified, and bureaucratically executed. This is why the “banality of evil” (Hannah Arendt’s term for the bureaucratic normalcy of atrocity) feels so resonant: proactive aggression is what really flourished under domestication.

    My next bone of contention with Wrangham is that most examples of reactive aggression he provides in his written work and lectures sounds a hell of a lot like bullying. Proactive bullying.

    With one hand, he defines reactive aggression as impulsive, hot-blooded, emotionally charged aggression…triggered by provocation or frustration and more or less immediate (not pre-planned). But in the same breath, he gives examples that clearly indicate planning, calculation, and strategic targeting. He cites situations where aggression is used to produce submission in the victim…not some kind of heat-of-the-moment explosion. I don’t know of any psychological taxonomies in which that behavior is a fit for reactive aggression.

    Why? Again, I think part of it has to do with his bonobo comparison. He needs “reactive aggression” as the thing bonobos and humans both suppress, to link his self-domestication theory. It certainly makes the story cleaner, too. “We eliminated bullies” sounds more like moral progress than “we empowered the strategic aggressors.” And it smells like simplification to me. By labeling bullying “reactive,” he folds it into his main category, even if the behaviors clearly involve planning.

    And by stretching his definition of reactive aggression, Wrangham masks the real driver. It wasn’t just hot tempers that got culled. It was all forms of disruptive autonomy. Including resistance, refusal, and yes, sometimes reactive outbursts. What flourishes is strategic aggression aligned with control systems (raids, executions, conquest, slavery). He’s essentially misclassifying proactive violence as the very thing his model claims was eliminated.

    The reason I’m attacking Wrangham so much is (likely) that there’s so much else I like about his hypothesis that makes the abrupt turn he takes extra upsetting. First, coalitionary enforcement absolutely matters. Once language and symbolic coordination were possible, groups could target individuals who disrupted group order. Second, domestication traits absolutely show up in humans. Smaller brains, more gracile features, extended juvenility…these parallel what happens when animals are bred for compliance. And Wrangham’s distinction between proactive and reactive aggression is useful, even he overcommits to one side.

    I get upset when he emphasizes a moral arc…we became “nicer” by suppressing reactive group members. The archaeological and historical record (slavery, bottlenecks, harems, systemic violence) points to a far darker dynamic…proactive aggression, control, and planned violence were selected for because they succeed in hierarchical systems. I don’t know how he doesn’t see this. How doesn’t he see the removal of disruptive resistance to control systems when he browses a history book through a domestication lens?

    I like Wrangham’s theories without the irrational optimism. For me, that looks like scarcity and group size growth leads to more need for control and coordination. Coalitions form, but instead of only targeting bullies, they target all disruptive reactivity (anyone who won’t conform to the group’s “world-as-it-should-be” model). Reactive individuals (autonomous resistors) are killed or excluded…predictable, compliant individuals survive and reproduce. And, as a byproduct, proactive aggression thrives…because it’s the aggression most compatible with systems of control. Paradox solved.

  • What Wrangham Gets Wrong About Human Domestication

    (Hint: 900,000 cows are slaughtered daily. They shit where they eat and wouldn’t have a hope in hell at surviving without human care. But they’re nice.)

    In The Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham argues that the main selection pressure in human (self-)domestication was the weeding out of reactive aggression. It’s a nice story that makes the net gain of human domestication harder to argue against. But, to me, it’s clear that selection against reactivity in general (or unpredictability) is the bigger, truer story, of which the reduction of “reactive aggression” is simply the most visible (and PR-friendly) chapter. Taken as a whole, and across species, the domestication package is clearly a general downshift in arousal/reactivity with a re-tuning of social expectations…not just the loss of hair-trigger violence.

    Let’s look at domestication again while entertaining this broader (and inconveniently less moralistic (duller, rather than nicer humans) selection pressure.

    For one thing, physiology moves first…and it’s general. In classic domestication lines (e.g. Belyaev’s foxes), selection for tameness blunts the HPA axis and stress hormones overall…fewer and fewer cortisol spikes, calmer baselines. That’s not “anti-aggression” specifically; it’s lower stress reactivity across contexts. Brain monoamines shift too (e.g. higher serotonin). That’s a whole-system calm that would make any behavior less jumpy (including but not limited to aggression).

    Developmental mechanism also points to a broader retune. The “domestication syndrome” is plausibly tied to mild neural-crest hypofunction, a developmental lever that touches pigmentation, craniofacial shape, adrenal medulla, and stress circuitry. In humans, BAZ1B (a neural-crest regulator) is linked to the “modern” face and is part of the self-domestication story. None of that is news…but if you tweak this lever, you clearly soften the whole reactivity profile…not just aggression. And my guess is that whoever’s fucking with the lever has his eye on the “compliance” dial more than any other.

    Comparative signals align, too. Genomic work finds overlaps between human selective sweeps and domestication-candidate genes across species…showing a syndrome-level process rather than some sort of single behavioral knob. Craniofacial “feminization” over time in H. Sapiens fits reduced androgenic/reactive profiles, too.

    Domesticated behavior tracks a “global calm.” Domesticated animals are less fearful, less erratic, and more socially tolerant than their wild counterparts. Your dog’s tendency to “look back” to you in unsolvable tasks is a manifestation of that…when arousal is lower and social cues are trusted, help-seeking beats reactive persistence. That’s a broad predictability play (that has nothing to do with aggression).

    Obviously, Wrangham’s focus still matters. His key point, the decoupling of reactive vs proactive aggression in humans (we got tamer in the heat-of-the-moment sense, but remained capable of planned, coalitionary violence), is real and important to explain. It’s part of the story, but not the whole story. As general reactivity is reduced, strategic (planned) aggression is preserved…because strategic aggression isn’t a startle reflex; it rides on executive control and group coordination. But selection against reactive aggression isn’t the driver in this story. It’s just one behavioral readout of a deeper arousal/volatility downshift. A nice part (maybe) of an otherwise quite shitty story (from life’s vantage point). The beef industry might point out how nice the cows are, but I don’t think even they would try to argue that “nice” is what it’s aiming for. Dull. Compliant. And so it goes with all domestication. There is an objective in the domestication process, and any and all traits that impede progress toward that objective are pruned. (adding “self-” to domestication when it comes to humans, while accurate in the sense that the domesticating agent was of the same species, gives it a voluntary flavor that has no evidence in history…the domestication of humans was driven by systemic enslavement and reproductive control just as it was for all domesticates)

    Why is it so important to me to find the driver of human domestication at all? Why not just start from the broadly-accepted premise that we are a domesticated species and go from there? Because I need to know what’s truly going on in the brain during this domestication process. How do we get to the brain we call “typical” now? What was it selected for? Was it selected for something broadly adaptive? Or is it more like runaway selection? An overfitting?

    To me, cognitively, domestication looks like a down-weighting of volatility and a reallocation of precision (in predictive-coding terms). Brains with lower expected volatility (that have “the world is less jumpy” as a hyperprior…fewer LC-NE-style alarm bursts…a calmer autonomic tone), higher precision on social priors (human signals are treated as the most trustworthy ones…ecological “noise” gets less weight), and policy canalization (high confidence in proximity/compliance/help-seeking policies).

    I think that human self-domestication primarily targeted behavioral and physiological volatility (a population-level reduction in phasic arousal and unpredictability) of which lower reactive aggression is a salient subset. And that the result is down-tuned HPA/LC reactivity, strengthened social priors, and canalized, low-variance action policies. Think of what happened as some sort of reactivity pruning (where reactive aggression was one prominent branch that got lopped off).

    What is the domesticated brain? Zoomed out, it’s clearly an instrument that’s been made dull. One that exhibits blunted responses to non-social unpredictability (startle, sensory oddballs, metabolic stressors), not just to dominance threats. And anti-aggression alone doesn’t suppress those.

    If I’m reading the studies properly, there are signatures of what I’m talking about in stress-regulatory and neuromodulatory pathways (HPA, serotonin, vasopressin) and neural-crest development…not just androgenic or specifically aggression-linked loci. Recent multispecies work pointing at vasopressin receptors and neural-crest regulators certainly seems consistent with this.

    Wrangham’s story doesn’t account for lower intra-individual variance in exploratory/avoidant switches and faster convergence on socially scaffolded policies (like help-seeking) across types of tasks (anti-aggression predicts biggest effects only in conflict contexts). It doesn’t explain the psychotic consensus reality holding everyone in, as it rolls off a cliff.

    (In fact, I question how much of the reactive aggression branch got lopped off…surely, not nearly as much as we think. What self-domestication mostly did was gate when, where, and how the majority of people show reactivity. When accountability and real-world consequences are high, most people keep a lid on it. When consequences drop (anonymity, distance, no eye contact, no immediate cost), the lid starts to rattle…online, in cars, in fan mobs, in comment sections. I don’t think reactive aggression was bred out so much as trained into context…and how well you do in that context will largely determine the story you tell. Harvard professors are clearly doing quite well in the civilizational context and consequently have pretty stories to tell.)

  • 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)

  • No…autistic people don’t struggle with complexity.

    We struggle with complex bullshit. Complexity that doesn’t stay in contact with reality. Complexity built to preserve delusion…systems of thought that multiply explanation instead of reduce error. It’s not the number of layers…it’s whether the layers track the thing they claim to represent.

    I’m fine with complexity when it emerges from feedback, remains falsifiable, stays anchored in pattern, can be broken open and examined, and responds when something stops working.

    I’m not fine with just-so stories, self-reinforcing abstractions, theories immune to contradiction, semantic inflation (changing definitions to preserve belief), or socially protected bullshit that silences doubt.

    I’m just fine with structure…it’s insulation I have a problem with.

    Bullshit = complexity that survives by outmaneuvering feedback.

    And yet………in the early stages of understanding something, I do feel averse to complexity.

    Like why the people around me seem fine when just about nothing in the world is fine. How did they get like this? Surely their disposition isn’t life’s baseline, or the earth wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has.

    I don’t like lists of reasons. I don’t look for explanations as much as singularities. Something that collapses the list. Something that makes that fork I’ve been writing about…the one where some groups of people stayed connected to reality and others adopt fictions that ultimately lead to genocide / ecological plunder / extinction…inevitable, traceable, and unambiguous (without resorting to mysticism, virtue, or accident).

    I’m allergic to narrative sprawl (I know, I know) masquerading as theory. I don’t want an ecosystem of causes…I want a keystone fracture.

    If the starting conditions are the same, why does one group protect an erroneous model of reality, and another let it break?

    I can’t help but feel that the first real difference is what the group is optimizing for, and whether that goal is visible to them or not. I think one group is optimizing for predictive accuracy, and the other is unconsciously optimizing for social coherence. There. I said it.

    I don’t claim they know they’re doing it. But every signal, every decision, every reaction is weighed (subconsciously) against one of those metrics. When the model breaks, that internal orientation determines the response. If the priority is accuracy? “The model must adapt.” If the priority is coherence? “The contradiction must be contained.”

    So not values or beliefs, but a deep system preference for truth-tracking versus conflict-minimization. And based on everything I’ve encountered…that really feels true. It clicks.

    And it begins long before it’s visible…it shows up in how children are corrected, how dissent is handled, how stories are told, whether doubt is sacred or dangerous, and whether speech is relational or investigative. One group sharpens awareness and the other flattens tension.

    Because social coherence “works,” doesn’t it? It feels good. It stabilizes something.

    So the first difference, the root divergence, the fork, is not belief, structure, or insight. It’s which pain the group is more willing to feel: the pain of being wrong, or the pain of disagreement. When error appears, will we change the story…or suppress the signal?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I’m “divergent” from WHAT, exactly?

    Civilization is a system that diverges from reality. Its function is to preserve unsustainable human behavior against natural feedback. It accomplishes this by suppressing, distorting, and severing ecological and biological feedback loops. As it becomes more effective at doing so, the living systems that depend on feedback to remain coherent (forests, animals people, ALL of life, ultimately) begin to break down.

    Feedback sensitivity, like every trait, exists on a scale. So it’s no surprise that the organisms most sensitive to feedback are the first to suffer when that feedback is polluted or withheld.

    Civilization gaslights by portraying feedback sensitivity as the deviation, when in fact it is the system itself that has broken from reality. Clearly. The evidence is everywhere it touches life: destroyed species, destroyed ecosystems, destroyed peoples.

    But within its dominant framework, “neurodivergent,” becomes a catchall for anyone whose nervous system fails to function “normally” within an environment that is fundamentally maladaptive.

    It bears repeating: the system you grieve being excluded from is maladaptive to ALL life. This isn’t a contentious statement. Turn on the news. You know it’s true. You feel it.

    The “norm,” the neurotypical person, is a hypothetical construct. It describes someone who can survive and thrive outside of reality, inside civilization’s distortions. But that person doesn’t exist. There are only people who appear to tolerate those distortions in the moment. Their bodies and minds are in deep distress, but the feedback doesn’t register on an immediate physiological level. It shows up as depression. Anxiety. Diabetes. Chronic inflammation. Autoimmune disorders. Panic attacks. Doomscrolling. Disassociation. Insomnia. And they look to their captor for solutions. Plastic surgeries. Weight-loss drugs. Self-help. Workplace wellness seminars. Sugar. Alcohol. Netflix. Adderall. SSRIs. Ambient music. Mindfulness apps. Therapy dogs.

    We need to stop speaking civilization’s language. We need reality again as a context. I’m so tired of validating the mass psychosis of broken systems.

  • Fuck “Nature”

    “I love nature.”


    “I don’t do well in nature.”


    “I like nature, but ______.”

    What the hell do you think nature is, exactly? Why is it reduced to a word? Is it one place among many? Where you bring your dog to take a shit? Where you take a picture of a sunset? What you call “nature” is literally EVERYTHING THAT ISN’T MODERN SOCIETY. That’s a lot to dismiss with a word. It’s 1.3 billion years of life. It’s everything that ever did and ever will provide food, water, and air. Everything you eat, drink, and breathe comes from it.

    Nature is REALITY. Swap “nature” with “reality” in everyday conversation, and see the insanity of the modern human paradigm.

    Wanting to be in reality is a good sign. A signal of health. I’ve been in “nature,” in places that were real, and I am better there. Every organism stands a better chance of thriving in what we call “nature” than in the distortions of modern life. We thrive in reality. Who the hell knew? When and why did we begin thinking otherwise? When did “nature” become something to compare life against? When did we fall for that trick?

    Let’s stop rewarding dissociation and calling it resilience.