The First to Fall

Thoughts

  • 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.

  • Never-Ending Conflict

    In this world, to stay in contact with real signals (pain, contradiction, grief, beauty, truth) is to invite a level of conflict with the system that cannot be sustained
    without breaking from it entirely. The cost of feeling becomes unsurvivable without collapse. This is the paradox I live in.

  • 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.

  • Nothing

    A new performance always starts with hope.

    Not the naïve kind…more like a quiet, aching belief that maybe this time, I can hold it together. That if I give enough of my effort, energy, and attention, something solid will finally form around me. Something real. So I say yes. To jobs. To invitations. To marriages. Yes. Yes. Yes. To any expectation that hangs in the air unspoken. I say YES to being useful. YES to being tireless. YES to being wanted.

    Everything about ME makes people uncomfortable, but at the age of eight, I find out hard work is always applauded. And that’s something I can do. That’s my first in. Never fewer than 2-3 jobs at a time. My. Whole. Life.

    At work, I become a machine. Relentless. Competent. First to arrive, last to leave. I never say no, because no one ever says no to me. I make myself indispensable. I perform stability, drive, charisma. And people love me for it. My performance is a flawless reflection of their expectations…changing in real time as they’re perceived.

    Everything about ME makes people uncomfortable, but at the age of sixteen, I find out my face is attractive. And that’s something I can use. That’s my second in. Never without a partner. My. Whole. Life.

    In relationships, I become another mirror. Attentive. Affectionate. Charming. Safe. I show up like the ideal partner, because part of me genuinely wants to be that person—for her, for myself. I make promises I don’t realize are promises: I’ll always be this available, this engaged, this put-together. It works. I’m praised, admired. I feel chosen.

    But the gap always shows up.

    At first it’s a small delay or a quiet sense of dread. Tasks that seemed easy feel heavy now. Conversations drain me. My moods swing. I can’t keep up the pace I set…not at work, not at home. But I don’t know how to say that. I don’t know how to say that I’m breaking. I don’t even know that’s what’s happening. I just feel tired. Agitated. Trapped. Off.

    Then comes shame. The unwelcome knowledge that I’m slipping. I can’t be the person they count on. I can’t.

    C-A-N-N-O-T. Not as in “choose not to,” but NOT ABLE TO.

    I know I’m about to let everyone down again. The thing is, I want to keep the promises. I’m just not built for the way I made them. But by the time I admit that to myself, I’m already failing. Already withdrawing.

    So I disappear…emotionally first, then physically. At work, I start missing details. Resenting the schedule. Loathing my own reputation. At home, I get quiet. Stop initiating. Smiling less. Sleeping more. I avoid questions. Avoid eye contact. Avoid being known.

    And they notice. They always notice. My boss. My partner. My friends. They can’t understand why I “changed.” Why the star employee lost his spark. Why the attentive husband grew cold. I can’t explain it either…not in a way that doesn’t sound like excuse. I hate what I’m becoming, but I can’t go back. The mask is too heavy. And I don’t know who was underneath it anymore.

    So I end things. Or they do. Or the universe does.
    Then comes the silence.

    And then, eventually, comes another chance. Another invitation. Another flicker of hope.
    And I think: Maybe this time.

    Over and over and over and over and over and over.

    I know the environment I need now. That I need. Now! After nearly five decades. But I can’t build it. I can’t go to it. I have insight in one hand and a lifetime of relational debt in the other.

    I go back to pretending.

    Or I collapse.

    Or I live in this unsustainable torture of the in-between.

    Is nothing real? Where am I? What have I done? What do I do? Is it me? Where am I?

  • I Have Nothing of Value to Say

  • 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.”

  • No Feedback = Dominance Hierarchy

    The problem isn’t the conservatives or the liberals. It isn’t capitalism. It isn’t democracy. It isn’t Trump. It isn’t corporations.

    The problem is simpler than that.

    In the absence of authentic feedback, power concentrates.

    Every.

    Single.

    Time.

    (10 unrelated (but related) examples off the top of my head)

    Irrigation Empires
    In rain-fed farming, drought or overuse directly affects local food supply. People adjust their behavior based on immediate ecological feedback. When irrigation systems emerge, they buffer these signals. Central planners control the water, so the consequences of overuse don’t reach them. This severance allows bureaucracies and elites to centralize control, since managing the infrastructure (not responding to the land) is what grants power.

    Bees and Pesticides
    In healthy ecosystems, bees rely on sensory feedback (smell, landmarks, hive cues) to forage and navigate. When pesticides disrupt these signals, bees become disoriented. Natural feedback about ecosystem health is silenced. As wild pollination declines, power shifts to corporations that sell commercial hives or artificial pollination services. The feedback loop that kept ecosystems adaptive is replaced with dependence on manufactured inputs.

    Five-Year Plans
    In a functional economy, local failures (bad harvests, overwork, material shortages) prompt direct corrections. Under Stalin’s central planning, officials fear punishment for failure, so they falsify reports. Honest feedback disappears. Quotas, not reality, guide decisions. Power concentrates in those who control narrative and allocation, not those who are responsive to conditions on the ground. Collapse looms, but the system can no longer see it coming.

    Social Media Algos
    In face-to-face interaction, people receive immediate social feedback (tone, expression, disagreement) that guides conversation. Platforms like TikTok or Facebook sever this feedback by filtering everything through opaque algorithms. What spreads is what generates clicks, not what builds understanding. Users can’t tell why they see what they see. Those who exploit outrage, manipulation, or performance rise to the top. Influence concentrates in those who bypass authentic social cues.

    Fragmented Elephant Herds
    In stable elephant societies, older matriarchs provide feedback…where to go, how to behave, when to fight or flee. Humans kill matriarchs and fragment herds…eliminating this feedback. Young males grow up without social correction. They become unusually aggressive or dominant, traits that wouldn’t thrive under proper guidance. Power concentrates in individuals unregulated by social memory, and the entire group loses coherence.

    The Founding Fathers to MAGA
    The U.S. system is built on feedback loops…checks and balances, press freedom, elections. Over time, these loops weaken. Media polarizes, districts are gerrymandered, campaign money distorts priorities. Citizens lose the ability to meaningfully influence power. Leaders rise who don’t need to respond to truth or consequence. Spectacle and branding replace accountability. The system rewards insulation over responsibility, and power concentrates accordingly.

    Foraging Societies to Aztec Empires
    Forage live close to ecological limits. If they overhunt or mistreat each other, the effects show up fast. Feedback is direct. As empires form, this feedback is replaced with hierarchy, tribute, and symbolic order. Rulers receive food, gold, and obedience, but not signals about ecological or social strain. They rule by ritual and abstraction. Power concentrates in those furthest from consequence, and collapse becomes inevitable.

    Small Family Farms to Monsanto
    On small farms, feedback from soil, weather, pests, and animals guides decisions. When industrial ag takes over, this feedback is muted by chemicals, contracts, and monoculture. Companies like Monsanto (Bayer) insert themselves between farmers and the land…controlling seed genetics, licensing, and supply chains. Farmers no longer adjust based on ecological feedback; they follow protocols. Power shifts to those who sell in puts and own patents, not those who observe the field.

    Socialism to Authoritarianism
    Young socialist movements promote worker feedback, collective decision-making, and material accountability. As these systems centralize, feedback gets buried. Leaders suppress dissent, equate criticism with betrayal, and create a climate of fear. The system stops adjusting to real conditions. Power accumulates in those who can enforce ideology and maintain order, not those who can listen, adapt, or serve. What starts as redistribution ends as command and control.

    Academic Institutions (from learning to gatekeeping)
    Initially, education is grounded in open inquiry and personal feedback…students ask questions, teachers respond, ideas evolve. As academia professionalizes, it filters feedback through credentials, metrics, and funding pipelines. Scholars no longer respond to real-world needs. They respond to peer review, grant conditions, and institutional politics. Feedback from the public, from learners, from reality itself gets severed. Authority concentrates in gatekeepers who control access to legitimacy.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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