There seems to be a persistent mental bug preventing us from building a sustainable civilization. So far I have been focusing on the cultural, technological and political aspects of how and why each and every technological civilization ended up in ruins, and why ours is no different. A recent revelation made me think, however, that behind all these issues there might be a major hardware failure… In our brains. Is there a way around that bug? Is it possible to prevent it from recurring?
Last week I ended my post calling for a psychological transition versus a material one. Little did I know back then, that I would be writing about the same topic from a psychiatric viewpoint one week later. Such is life though: you never know what comes next. Before we delve into how our brains hijack societies (and vice verse), first let’s review the civilizational predicament we are in on the software level; i.e.: what’s apparently going wrong in our societies time after time when it comes to cajoling a bunch of apes into pulling in one direction.
The problem description goes something like this: As the civilizations we build mature, they increasingly become more rigid; not only when it comes to how they do things, but more importantly: how they think. They gradually lose their ability to recognize — let alone solve — problems, and become increasingly sclerotic and calcified. Problems initially resolvable by an adept leadership grow larger and larger until they become intractable, and burgeoning bureaucracies make even the simplest of adjustments mission impossible.
While enacting new institutions are often done to solve rational problems (like the need to collect taxes in an organized way), they almost invariably end up becoming the most irrational things humans have ever created…
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