H2O Man Survey #39

[Fairgo]

47. Clever apes in complex systems

I'm going with "all of the above".

We are a genetic hypothesis in Earth's Living System laboratory. And the question is, Can our evolved ability to reason sustain the species? Freud was prescient in pointing out the battleground of the ego as base urges and higher thought wrestle for control in individual, community, state and global spheres. The problem that unites all of the above is that our technical cleverness has played in to hands of our collective id before our collective superego could shape the collective human psyche. The original sin? Not knowledge, as ascribed to our exile from Eden, but the unquenchable thirst for more...power. It expressed itself in the extermination of civilisations, through to its latest incarnation in capitalism. The assumption of ever increasing profit, however benignly defined, ultimately destroys the system, the host. And our cleverness has built levels of technology that are artifacts of that existential greed, great machines bent on consuming everything and ignoring the growing poisons in the backwash. Oddly, it was the ghost of Christmas present who drew back his robe and revealed Want and Ignorance, and warned us all, "Fear these."

Violence is how power is wrested from the just person and the just path. You can see it baked into everything that proceeds my comments, and ever commercial that crosses your screen. What is missing from the list is the violence against our better nature (the worship of want and ignorance), and the violence against the planet.

So we go careening into a rather assured depopulation as there is a Physics at work that ultimately will require a return to balance at odds with our stewardship. That will be the final test of the clever apes. For the few who are left, can they imagine a world where profit is replaced by balance? Where the search for understanding replaces the search for more?