Laying Blame: Population vs. Consumption

[GliderGuider]

18. I think that's the thing most people don't understand.

People persist in thinking that civilization is not a power-maximizing system, that it's something else instead, like a relatively malleable set of social, economic or political arrangements. It's not. Civilization is a self-organizing complex adaptive system whose Prime Directive appears to be to maximize its power throughput in the interests of increasing its size and organization.

The mechanisms like politics and economics that we develop along the way to support that process are almost incidental. Certainly their forms are incidental - except that each of the mechanisms in place today exists because it was better at supporting the Prime Directive than any competing mechanism.