Impossible is nothing: a common-sense look at the miracle of existence

(Part I)

Love thine enemy. – Jesus of Nazareth

Love your neighbour as yourself. – Leviticus

Struggle in the way of God. – I understand that this is how Jihad tends to appear in the Q’ran

It is easy to hate and difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get. – Confucius

Introduction

I know of no imperative more radical and all encompassing than “Love thine enemy”. Whether the origin of this famous phrase is The Bible, and thus Christianity, is irrelevant; it neatly captures what love actually entails, how profoundly challenging it is.

Can anyone truly love their enemy? Ponder what love-based relations would mean between Ukrainians and Russians, or between Israelis and Palestinians. 

When we cannot love our enemies in our millions and billions, does humanity become volatile, cynical, subject to the endlessly repeating tragedies of massed hate and fear? The terrible energy of compounding, uncorrected cynicism and volatility at cultural and civilisational scale is on ugly display across the world. Love could not seem more preposterous an instruction.

Switching religious rubric, how is your Jihad coming along? How robust is your godly commitment to the evolution and authenticity of your humility? Love without humility is not love. Humility without love is not humility.

Are such musings political or ideological/religious? Both? How about pragmatic?

I do not subscribe to either left- or right-wing politics; I can fathom no healthy reason to be loyal to an ideology. But, it would be naïve of me not to recognise that politics is the art of defending and effecting your principles, mores and morality in the world. One can pontificate all manner of things, and many of us do. But translating ideas into action in the sphere of any kind of governance or bureaucracy or group activity is politics. Indeed, it is as if the raison d’être of earthly existence – more specifically of human existence – is politics: What is feasible and actionable, now, given the irreducibly complex reality of the situation at hand?

The more truly loving you are in your deepest being – in other words, the more authentically you can love your enemies – the richer and wiser your vision of what is pragmatically possible in any given situation. So, wouldn’t love indeed make the world a healthier, happier place? Isn’t it that simple (logically speaking)? Why not, for example, put in the hard work needed to make love and wisdom foremost in our educational processes? Why not make best efforts to develop and nurture as wise and loving a population as we can?

This line of inquiry has become the core of my work here at Econosophy. I would like to see it either thwarted as unreasonable or silly, or, failing that, taken up by people more effective than I am at encouraging others to take this analysis to heart, and run with it.

This article follows on directly from The Power Trap by exploring more deeply the fundamentally cyclical patternings I derive from the best logical deduction my faculties can muster, namely the 

curiosity ➜ slow mastery ➜ automation/internalisation ➜ breakdown/decadence ➜ curiosity …

cycle the previous article briefly referenced (see image above for a little more flesh to its skeleton). In so doing, I attempt to sketch out solid rhetorical ground for seeing such cyclicality as a spiral subject to evolution/progress and thus as a rational spur to taking wisdom, love and total health more seriously at governance and cultural levels.

Buckle up Uncle Buck; Kansas is about to dissolve before our eyes.

A rapid-fire recap of my general position

[Peter Frankopan] looks into hundreds of empires […] over three millennia […] and how they went out, [and finds] aspects of what we’re doing now that are just as insane, whether you’re looking at the Moguls, the Mongols, the Persians, the eastern or western Romans, or the British; they all do really stupid things at the end. […] It’s power pollutes, and absolute power pollutes absolutely, that sort of thing. – Larry Wilkerson in discussion with Professor Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris

I roam this analytical territory because humans do not thrive under the auspices of corruption, and I think this is becoming painfully clear to a growing percentage of the West. Isn’t something gnawing at us, nagging away at the back – or front – of our minds that Things Aren’t Right? Don’t we yearn for transparency, decency, honesty, trust and dignity more than we crave uni-party politics, virtue signalling, untrustworthy media, ever more entrenched polarisation, ever crappier consumer products, ever shallower entertainment, ever less nutritious food, etc.?

Yes, we enjoy cheap and easy thrills for all sorts of reasons, but we’re learning, the hard and squalid way, that this cheapness is profoundly unsatisfying and, in fact, sickening. We’re learning that deep friendship, mature parenting, courageous and honest leadership, healthy communities and ecosystems, etc. are far more important, that these self-evidently good things are in fact the ground on which the more whimsical pleasures become and remain meaningful.

A robustly meaningful life is, in essence, a wisely sustained dynamic balance that continually creates total health. Succeeding at this long term, purposefully and mindfully, requires a good understanding – whether in the form of unconscious reflexes or mindfully developed – of how existence works, especially when the entity that is to remain healthy over time is as complex and unwieldy as a human culture. From the perspective of this article, here is a bare-bones list of the core elements one might ponder when working towards good understanding:

1. Reality includes cyclicality
2. The nature of that cyclicality can only be an expression of the nature of reality
3. Reality also includes evolution* (aka negative entropy) else there would be no life on earth
4. Evolution means historical cyclicality is an uneven spiral, not a revolving wheel
5. Humanity must now learn wiser cultural responses to power’s corrupting vector: we have WMD
6. Because wising up is possible (evolution is fundamental), wising up is clearly the way to go

* In my conception, “evolution” is more than biological; it is fundamental to reality and is fundamentally about wisdom.

The best three words for poetically expressing what I mean by “wising up” are “Love thine enemy”. As Confucius suggested, this is far from an easy undertaking. But seeing as we are increasingly aware of the dangerous pitfalls of lazy submission to our shallower pleasures and appetites, perhaps the attractiveness of this beautifully difficult and fundamentally earthly challenge is growing.

Are we finally ready to want to do the hard work it takes to build a healthier world in tipping-point numbers? I suspect that precarious moment approaches. But you cannot force love in, or hate out. Force is not the way. We have to pay our dues organically; we have to mean it. We are tasked with honestly and fully learning where we’re at with what we currently are. The tipping point will therefore necessarily include sober acceptance of our state of consciousness in all its ugliness and beauty. 

Will we baulk and pull back to double down yet again as the daunting enormity of the task gapes open before us?

Because nothingness cannot be, what good is suffering?

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism. – Camus

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence - why there is something rather than nothing. – Allan Sandage [my emphasis]

(This complicated section progresses from identifying value in inquiring into the question of existence, then moves on to how our ontological convictions affect both our understanding of suffering’s role and what we should do about it.)

What is possible? Constrained by our nature and circumstances, what can humans accomplish? What can we reasonably expect of progress? I believe we cannot properly address such questions without starting from the very bottom: existence itself.

An illuminating thought experiment that can lead anyone who takes it seriously into the depths of reality begins with this simple-seeming (teleological) question: 

Why is there existence? 

More controversially: Can there be such a ‘thing’ as nothingness? 

When you really think about it, it is truly awe inspiring that there is something rather than nothing. For example, is it equally probable, theoretically, that reality ‘be’ nothing, rather than something? Could reality even be real if it were pure nothingness? Is total non-existence possible at all? If nothingness were a realistic possibility, could being even be?

These may seem facile – though tortuous – questions, but they serve an important logical function. I happen to believe that nothingness is a logical impossibility. For me it follows, therefore, that reality cannot not be, and eternally so. In other words, it is 100% certain, eternally, that there be existence. Reality is immortal.

Nothingness cannot be, because to really, truly, strictly ‘be’ nothing – and not merely our conception of or theorising about nothing, e.g. a chaotic void capable of spawning richly complex big bangs –, ‘it’ would have to have zero properties and qualities. Otherwise, ‘it’ would be a something. To exist, to be able ‘to be’ in the first place, one of the properties nothingness would have to include is the property of existing. ‘It’ cannot therefore exist; that would give ‘it’ at least one property, which ‘it’ cannot have by virtue of ‘being’ nothingness.

Nothingness is only ‘plausible’ as a thought experiment that highlights the curious oddity of non-existence and the eternity of existence. It is one of the many domains that science cannot properly address. It is best traversed with rhetoric and poetics.

Impossible is nothingness.

This may seem like disingenuous tautological casuistry, perhaps even simplistic, but, to my mind, the logic reveals something fundamentally contradictory about the notion that nothingness can be a thing, or, exist. Nothingness is a fundamental impossibility, and I happen to find this thought awe-inspiring. To wit: 

If nothingness is impossible, earthly existence is not suspended in any kind of void; nothingness can have no properties, including the ability to accommodate 3d ‘objects’, and being a ‘fabric’ ‘made of’ spacetime. Nothingness cannot change either, therefore time, as change, cannot be a function of or impact on nothingness. If time cannot relate to nothingness, how could nothingness permit light to travel ‘through’ it? Nothingness would then be a thing within which light waves propagated over time. It follows, then, that existence cannot be spatially situated within infinite or dimensionless non-existence.

Nor do I see a vacuum as nothingness; it is the result of extracting air and any other materials from an area defined by some surrounding casing such that forces act on it very powerfully. A vacuum is thus a thing sustained by the context of other things that can act upon it. As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum, which means vacuums are acted upon by the rest of nature, and thus things. Non-existent, nothingness cannot be acted upon, cannot be redressed or corrected.

But more importantly to the matter at hand, if nothingness is impossible, so is death as most Westerners appear to understand it. “What happens when we die?” “Oh … nothingness.” What many humans see as death is, on my logic, in fact but one manifestation of change. And yet billions of us fear death viscerally. From this misunderstood – though biologically reasonable – fear of ‘death’, much suffering springs. This is the ontological connection between the nature of reality – the nature of existence – and suffering that interests us here. 

There is an implied but pervasive sense of nothingness at the heart of the mechanistic/humanistic/atheistic paradigm. Materialism proceeds from an assumption of ‘death’, aka ‘dead’ ‘matter and energy’ (whatever they are), from which it somehow conjures mechanical/biological ‘life’ that sinks back into ‘death’ as a result of unavoidable causes like ageing or accident or sickness. Yes, you can argue that ‘life’ and the earth’s biosphere are therefore precious miracles of awe-inspiringly unlikely happenstance, but that argument does not dispel the fact of death dominating a merciless and unimaginably vast universe in which biological ‘life’ represents but a vanishingly small percentage: beautiful, improbable ‘life’ as consolation prize in an oceanic death: fragile, tenuous, alone. This is in essence what materialism implies, and what those who unquestioningly subscribe to it kinda-sorta feel about the nature of existence. 

Is this paradigmatic perspective, which proceeds from death, from nothingness, logically sound?

This question of course alludes to the dualistic dilemma of consciousness and matter as rival fundamental phenomena for ontology. Which of these two phenomena you deem fundamental strongly influences your relationship with, and ideological reaction to, suffering, and also how you value life (whatever you think that is).

All this begets another deep question: Is there any value to asking why? Humanist/materialist science finds teleology (querying the purpose or why of phenomena) anathema, but I believe teleology has real value, if only because grappling with fundamental issues teleologically bears unexpected fruit. For example:

Why is there suffering? 

Our response to this question strongly impacts how far we think we should go – societally, politically, economically – to minimise suffering. Let’s begin with, “Don’t ask why.”

If we fundamentally dismiss purpose from our reasoning, what then is suffering? Is it mechanical and therefore illusory? Is suffering simply irritating grit in the machinery of existence, machinery we then ‘perfect’ in pursuit of efficiency using cost-benefit calculations? This would be suffering understood as a drag on efficiency, an irksome albatross around the neck of economic growth. Or perhaps as a driver of economic growth in the sense of miracle cures of endless variety but low effectiveness; endless suffering is good for business.

While we might being doing very well on this mechanical track in some respects, in others – see rapid-recap section above – things don’t look so rosy. In other words, can we meaningfully address the problem of suffering, with wise compassion, without addressing its purpose? I think not. I think history shows us getting inexorably bogged down in cynicism, and dysfunctionally so.

Luxury makes pain seem even harder, and dulls and weakens one’s pleasures. For the person who is always luxuriating and never touches pain will end up unable to endure any pain at all, and also not be able to feel any pleasure, not even the most intense. – Dio Chrysostom (seen in an Academy of Ideas video)

I do not mean to imply that a teleological approach yields easy answers; quite the opposite. I find suffering extremely hard to tackle. I know sociological inquiry into relative wealth in money and material terms has produced all sorts of statistical correlations between health and success outcomes, but, as is so often the case with academic studies, the findings produced are not teleologically satisfying. What is happiness? What is wisdom? What is health? What are success and failure? What is money and how does it measure worth, wealth, value? These are devilishly hard questions to answer, especially academically, especially materialistically. How rich and wise is our understanding of suffering if we do not properly address such questions?

Obviously, I find the question of suffering pivotal, and I think most humans do. I don’t know anyone not adversely affected by corruption, rampant mendacity, the disappearance of trust-based and vital communities, moral ambiguity, etc. Humans, as all animals in fact, don’t do well in a sick environment. To repeat: Is the current sickness of our Western-dominated global situation inevitable due to historical, dawn-to-decadence cyclicality, which is itself inevitable because Human Nature is immutable, or rather, devoid of free will, robotic? If yes, then perhaps there’s no point trying to respond wisely to cyclicality; it’s inevitable and humans obviously don’t got what it takes. So quit whining. 

On this mechanistic, anti-teleological logic, there is in fact no point to anything, by definition. And yet we respond to reality as if there were; we suffer compounding crises of meaning when our culture tells us there is no purpose, that existence is fundamentally dead.

We appear to suffer fundamentally under the paradigmatic belief (or cultural reflex) that there is no point to it all, that life is a mechanical happenstance in a fundamentally dead universe. Of course humans also suffer in superstitious or religious-authoritarian contexts, but I’d guess for downstream (non-paradigmatic) reasons of corruption; any state system that becomes stagnantly sclerotic exacerbates corruption by virtue of too much power in too few hands; this is a function of power, not of ‘spirituality’.

But I’m not writing this article to announce the winner of The Battle of the Paradigms. What I’m trying to do is defend the possibility of very broad-scale evolutionary progress that passes through vacillating, socially experimental stages. That is, I’m probing why history rhymes, and suggesting the reason for its rhyming is closely connected to suffering’s purpose.

Specifically, I’m arguing that humanist science in the guise of Scientism/Materialism, currently the vanguard of human progress in certain respects, has thrown out too much baby with the bathwater of corrupted, superstitious, authoritarian religion by studiously ignoring immeasurable – but fundamental – phenomena like love and wisdom. Materialism, the hegemonic West’s paradigm, has predictably become moribund and sclerotic as the West’s power corrupts itself into end-stage decadence. Wisdom and love are its blindspots, so to speak, as is health in the rich, all-encompassing way I mean it at Econosophy. ‘Objective’ measurement is materialism’s dogma, its unimpeachable holy of holies. As such, immeasurable and ineffable phenomena have been recklessly demoted in the maelstrom of material progress.

Is it not self-evident that we thrive on awe? Why do we find awe so inspiring, but fundamental nothingness so … emptying?

For example, does the following assertion inspire you? Consciousness is an illusion because reality is mechanical and thus fundamentally dead. Consciously experienced suffering is therefore likewise an illusion. You might think, Yay! No more suffering for me, it’s just an illusion!, but I’d bet good money your initial enthusiasm would quickly exhaust itself.

Alternatively, if the purpose of suffering were to provoke maturation into full adulthood, both of individual humans and, now, of extremely large groups of humans, would that not be more inspiring, more empowering? Would that not cast progress in a different light, lend it a richer, more noble aspect?

The West’s generalised sense of irksome suffering seems to be precisely that aspect of human existence we want politics to mitigate. ‘Progress’ appears to be understood, in essence, as the steady diminishment of our suffering, the cleaning up of our self-made messes by The Powers That Be. ‘Progress’ is an ever easier life for more and more people.

Wouldn’t this make us incompetents who cannot take care of our own business, Hobbesian incompetents who need elite Incredibles to keep us from ruining our world? How do we know our reflexive expectations and demands of progress aren’t turning us into brats spoilt by our ever more convenient lives, as in “good times make weak men?” If we have indeed become brattish, we would first need to acquire a good understanding of what “hard times make strong men” and “good times make weak men” really mean before we can lastingly remedy our brattish oversensitivity to suffering. We would need, at the cultural level, a far more nuanced understanding of the role of suffering.

I discussed some of the issues on the curious matter of how enduring and overcoming suffering adds richness to a human’s character a while ago, but still feel like I am only scratching the surface of this pivotal issue. Below is my current thinking on the role of suffering as a fundamental aspect of reality, which is also a roundabout way of beginning to define it.

It seems fundamental to me that resistance (opposition of some kind) is required for there to be meaningful decision-based action, action, that is, that has the potential to contribute to some sort of evolution or maturation of your character, of your wisdom, as you learn from the consequences of each action you take. Then, in addition to this needed resistance (opposition), the quality and quantity of chance/randomness, namely the unpredictable free-will ingredient a living system needs to evolve meaningfully – that is, in a non-robotic way that can be a conscious, deliberate effort to improve – compounds fractally in the vast melee of life to produce dizzyingly complex diversity, which, I believe, produces ever richer challenges to continued evolution. In other words, suffering evolves too. 

Think tribes to chieftaincies to city states to civilisations to nation states to multinational corporations, etc. These ever more complex human groupings as crucibles of increasingly diverse challenges are mirrored by the ever more powerful enemy bosses a computer-game player must defeat to level up in a given computer game, so it’s not as if this idea is outlandish or even original. I’m just asserting that it is fundamental to the nature of reality and grounding my assertion in the curious impossibility of nothingness.

Finally, when you add in acute human sensitivity, ego, fear, imagination, hedonism, laziness, etc., and mix in a culturally shallow understanding of progress, you get an interpretation/experience of resistance/opposition that translates, in a generalised way, to suffering. 

On this logic, suffering is an immature perception of misunderstood challenges, even though challenge – suffering – is an eternal aspect of reality.

But surely this is violently callous of me. How can it be immature to experience the horrific realities being endured by Palestinians in Gaza as suffering? And there are countless other unbearable intensities of suffering happening right now, everywhere on earth, that are far too many to list, and far too gruesome. We are at each other’s throats and it keeps getting worse.

Such suffering appals me, sickens me, makes me despair for humanity. It makes the phrase “Love thine enemy” seem vicious, fantastical, cruelly naïve. But horrors of genocidal scale happen again and again throughout human history even though the vast majority of us don’t want them to occur. Why? Why are we failing so egregiously in our attempts not to repeat them? 

The key word, for me, is “scale”.

Civilisation represents a massive scaling up of human society from hunter-gatherer bands. We are social animals who, for hundreds of thousands of years, could not manage to band together in larger numbers than the low hundreds (so the theory goes). That we have managed to band together in the billions has increased the complexity of our societies, as of our intra- and inter-group socialising, the complexity and richness of our cultures, and, I argue, massively increased the intensity, scale and horror of the suffering we can cause each other, because we remain gifted at dehumanising whomever we select as our Enemy Other, perhaps more than ever before.

I dearly want us to be more noble than that. I dearly want us to take seriously what loving our enemies involves. I want us to want to move beyond the dehumanisation that enables the hideous hatred that leads to genocide and too many other horrors. This is what my efforts here are all about.

The Power Trap looked at the ‘stabilising’ social technology we call the State, a ‘stabilising’ technology that bands people together at scales that dwarf the low hundreds that was humanity’s lot for hundreds of thousands of years. The article establishes that the Hobbesian power required to set up and sustain a state is in fact a destabilising and corrupting factor. The article identifies power’s ability to forestall correction as the primary reason why power corrupts. From this it is easy to deduce that our short-sighted, reflexive human tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, allied with state power, strongly tends to produce terrible historical suffering at genocidal scale: whole peoples against other whole peoples – millions and billions strong – because we tend not to want to do the irksome work of becoming wise, both individually and at group scale. Wisdom begets love and love cannot dehumanise.

Today, we have nuclear weapons and other means of wiping ourselves out. This perennial problem could not be more pressing. 

Is there something wiser for humanity than our history suggests? Is human nature capable of ‘spiritual’ evolution as I suggest immediately below? This is the pivotal question. Certain individuals do choose to walk the love path, and do indeed become healthy, wise, and loving, but throughout history they have been extremely rare. Looking at the raw stats, you’d have to conclude that life is suffering for most of the people most of the time; show me your precious ‘progress’ now, dreamer! 

And yet this dismal characterisation of our lot does not seem to apply to our non-human companions, who lack the capacity to worry about suffering in an abstract, self-pitying way. They just get on with life. Theirs is a biological, or individually unearned, wisdom that sees them through. Incapable of civilisation, they are under no pressure to earn the sort of cultural wisdom humanity so dearly needs to improve.

In other words, humans appear to have a different remit. I believe it to be fundamentally ‘spiritual’, by which I mean primarily concerned with consciously evolving earned wisdom at cultural scale. Humanity’s challenge, I assert, is to learn to love our enemies, but this is a mighty difficult undertaking that must now happen at civilisational scale if we are to avoid self-destruction.

What manner of challenge is this? What happens to group-based power (the state) if love and humility render groupthink impossible? Conversely, what happens if ideological groupthink continues to stiffen – “Don’t bug me with fripperies like love and wisdom, I’ve got a household/company/country to protect!” –, to create ever more defensively rigid power structures across the globe? It’s a terrifying thought.

Love is pragmatic

Five of China’s 17 dynastic collapses over its 2,200 year history were the result of famine. China suffers on average one major catastrophe – drought or flood – annually. Due to its long and almost indefensible northern border, China’s central plain has been conquered at least eight times by nomadic tribes. This is all a consequence of China’s unique geography as harsh taskmaster; this is geography as teacher of the necessity of compromise, diplomacy, tenacity and the importance of a stable people wise and skilled enough to handle that sort of constant challenge. (Source)

We could therefore argue that China has not been permitted to develop the lasting cultural ambition needed to attain the sort of geopolitical hegemonic power that currently corrupts the West. For example, during the Ming Dynasty from 1405 to 1433, Admiral Zheng He ruled the seas for China, and yet despite naval know-how that was centuries ahead of the West’s at that time, China chose not to settle colonies across the Indian Ocean and Africa, etc., chose not to expand its empire across the world. Instead, the Ming Dynasty viewed the threat from the northern nomadic tribes sufficiently grave that it chose to disband its navy and redirect the freed resources to defence of their realm. I view this as a wise choice by a civilisation that was old and mature enough to value stability (harmony) over the risky riches colonial conquest might yield.

Note that this expression of wisdom is not starry eyed or romantic, and is hard won via suffering. It is coldly pragmatic and calculating. “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” Love and wisdom are mutually indwelling, give each other meaning and functionality, and co-evolve to sustain health, as health sustains their co-evolving. 

The example I chose is thus illustrative of the pragmatics of love as I mean the phrase. Perhaps my choice seems jarring, but love is not romance, nor is it dewy eyed, nor is it self-delusional. All that stuff belongs to romance, to eros, to cupid’s arrow: a different beast. Love includes the strength of character needed to change course, to admit error, to notice correction is needed and accept it despite the pain, the loss of status, of face, etc. Love is, as I repeatedly state, synonymous with wisdom and health. The three concepts constitute a trinitarian whole whose component parts mutually explain each other by virtue of constituting the trinity they are.

Conversely, power tends to corrupt. However, this does not mean necessarily it must continue unabated. Let’s not be absolutist about this; absolute power is impossible. Let’s also not assert that China is perfect. No governance system is perfect. There will always be more to learn, more wisdom and love to evolve, etc. But the above example demonstrates that civilisational power need not corrupt to self destruction, that its clear tendency to corrupt is very apparent to those with eyes to see, and thus can be mindfully monitored somehow. Whether anarchic or direct-democracy arrangements are superior to China’s systems of governance, or inferior to a constitutional republic, etc., is not my concern here. I’m merely pointing out areas of discussion I consider relevant to the challenge of developing a sustainable cultural awareness of the importance of wisdom and how this relates to suffering. We’re trying to avoid both destroying ourselves and repeatedly committing atrocities against whole peoples in our wilful blindness to viable alternatives to The System so viscerally and violently defended by the West’s current crop of vested interests. I am confident that group wisdom, at large scale, is pivotal to this.

For example, developing further the assertion I made above that earthly existence is politics, a wise approach to preventing horrific suffering would include empathic diplomacy among different national governance systems such that one dispassionately appreciates how mutual tensions inevitably occur between cultures and civilisations, rather than ideologically or competitively seeking to best them. Decisions are investments in the future. At civilisational scale, switching governance system – an extremely complex investment – to accommodate the aggressive demands of some civilisational competitor would be impossibly costly to the point of self-destructive. Deep differences of perspective are the natural consequence of many, many factors, but more importantly it should be plain to each of us how hard it is for us to fundamentally change our perspectives on a dime. Hegemonic ambition, by definition, cannot respect this obvious truth, cannot behave empathically. Wisdom thus includes the requisite humility to empathise with those who differ deeply from us. Domination is thus not a wise posture. Humble co-existence between Self and Other is. (And by the way, humble does not mean weak.)

“Respect existence or expect resistance.”

The fundamental cycle

All that set up, we finally arrive at the purpose of this mighty rhetorical endeavour:

curiosity ➜ slow mastery ➜ automation/internalisation ➜ breakdown/decadence ➜ curiosity …

What does it mean? 

It’s my attempt to sketch out the brightest aspects of how evolution – that which consciousness is about – breathes in and out to continually become, or create, or earn, increasing richness, or continual growth of its beautiful complexity. Because this is a function of consciousness – which is what reality is – it is about patterning as evolving process. 

Patterning is data processing as information perception (aka creativity; meaning is created via perception) in the sense of interpretation (perception is always interpretation). Consciousness self-perceives the data (the potential for pattern) that it is, and in so doing interprets it into information, fractally, iteratively. Consciousness is a meaning-making entity. Preference, which begets value by experiencing reward of some kind, is also fundamental to this ever evolving process.

The cycle I’ve delineated asserts that curiosity – itself a cycle (explorative) – is fundamental because consciousness is obviously eternally curious. Curiosity begets experimentation – itself a cycle (iterative) –, which delivers results that are experienced as successes or failures depending on the intention and value preferences behind the experimentation. This process leads to a kind of mastery, e.g., a human baby learning to walk. Walking is transformed from a curiosity-led and fascinating/obsessive struggle into automated or internalised processes – which are also cyclical (iterative) – that take far less effort than the obsessive struggle towards mastery. Automation thus frees up the resources previously devoted to learning, whereupon curiosity looks around for the next attractive adventure. 

This mini-loop creates an attendant or consequent larger loop – breakdown/decadence (exhaustion, or ageing, or serious accident in the case of walking) – that brings about, and/or is an interface with, interference from the ‘outside’ in a manner that impedes curiosity in an oppositional or challenging way. This exchange with Other/Environment acts to correct (keep healthy) the three-part loop just delineated. It’s called feedback, which I’m casting in the role of opposition, but we could also define it as the constraining structuring (rules, patterning) that inhibits freedom such that action is meaningfully instructive rather than arbitrary and wholly uninhibited* (feedback free). 

*Imagine action wholly without consequence or feedback; you would have no way of knowing you have performed it. Poetically, you could say gravity makes a baby want to walk. Poetically, you could say opposition makes existence possible. Poetically, you could say suffering makes existence meaningful.

Biologically driven curiosity – e.g. learning to walk – sets up internalised/automated (muscle-memory) processes that last a lifetime (assuming constant use). Sociologically and personality driven curiosity sets up (psychological/cultural) processes that can span generational time, or that can repeat multiple times within a lifetime. Dating partners to find your perfect mate can produce several breakdown/decadence stages as each relationship fails to handle the collapse in romance that follows the automation/internalisation stage. Compare this with muscle-memory skills that decay if wholly unused, as in “use it or lose it”. And the sorts of wisdoms that are learned in partnerships and friendships, in family life, in careers, etc., feed into each other. Such experiences and the curiosities that trigger them are not discreet objects, they are interoperating and intermingling patternings that co-evolve dynamically.

To look at a broader, cultural example, a people might tame fire and develop ways to pass the skill on down through generations. In time, this people might develop metallurgy. Later, it might develop steam power, then manufacturing, etc. Each accomplishment is automated into the culture as a cultural wisdom that then initiates different sets of challenges – unintended consequences – that can interoperate over time to produce things like wars, mass formation and dehumanisation programmes, and on to genocidal atrocities.

It isn’t easy to depict all this as a neat drawing. The way I envisage the interrelations between these various (complex) loops cannot be faithfully captured in a Venn diagram; there’s not really a ‘within’ here. Nor is this sort of contemplative reasoning meant to deliver tightly accurate predictive power. It is rather a hobbyist’s thought experiment that hopefully offers a perspective on our challenges as a species confronted with our potential to destroy ourselves and all our civilisations because we’ve forgotten how to talk to each other across cultural differences (diplomacy is a very old cultural/group wisdom). It seeks to construct a plausible view of reality’s fundamentals that meaningfully de-emphasises competitive rivalry in favour of dispassionate and empathic communication at inter-group scales. It is an attempt to explain how, and why, history and evolution do what they do to cyclically present humanity with daunting challenges. Today, our challenges are satanic in character – by satanic I mean a functional insanity that is ultimately dysfunctional – as decadence metastasises into wanton debauchery and accelerating moral breakdown. I believe the profundity of this rot happens to result from the end-of-life stage knocking loudly at the doors of humanism, materialism and Western hegemony, and, perhaps, labour-as-value/money-as-price as well, but this is a global challenge whose timing I am consistently wrong about.

The bolded stage – automation/internalisation – is of particular interest to me. While I see automation as fundamental, there are elegant and inelegant versions thereof. A rain forest is a spectacular example of elegant automation, as is muscle memory. In stark contradistinction, the breathless – historically speaking – rush of factory automation, mass production, consumerism, propaganda morphing into insidious public relations and mass-behavioural nudging is inelegant, clunky, brutish. Describing it so is intended to highlight the incredibly difficult challenge of internalising/automating group wisdom at vast scale, now perhaps internationally, perhaps even species wide. The WEF’s Great Reset is an unimaginative, crass attempt at what is needed in terms of a kind of global awareness of ourselves as one species with a particular ‘spiritual’ remit. We have to do much better than the truly infantile transhumanist fantasies that drive the WEF’s bizarro agenda. Theirs is the predictable product of materialism as it relates to nothingness and nihilism writ large: a kind of toxic froth with garish PR lipstick smeared across it, the barren brainchild of an ‘elite’ that has become wholly divorced from reality on the soul-addling flatulence of its fetid isolation born of its power to forestall correction.

Conclusion

We are not Hobbesian beasts by nature, we are Hobbesian beasts by governance system and paradigm. We are capable of group wisdom; the state and civilisation demonstrate this unequivocally, albeit unevenly, albeit as never ending story. Our nature has adapted to evolutionary development in our governance systems in a number of ways, but we are still having great difficulty with fear-based dehumanisation. Nuclear weapons mean we do not have the luxury of failing this challenge arrogantly and expecting things to settle back down to some cherished Old Normal. But crucible-like pressure is what we need to sober up, pay closer attention to our lot, and wise up. In addition to our regrettable powers of dehumanisation, we are also outraged by them. Our valiant efforts to cast ourselves in the role of victim is a clear sign of this. While it may be cynical virtue signalling, it is cynical virtue signalling that is needed for deeply noble reasons; we care about honour, we care about decency, we care about each other. Humans care.

We are not Hobbesian beasts. We simply face a very difficult transitional trial whose most fundamental character is an unfortunate systemic addiction to power’s lamentable potential to forestall correction, to kick the can down the road. By “simply”, I mean that the nature of the problem is easy to identify. However, I do not mean that it is easy to remedy. We may well fail. Nuclear armageddon could happen, or multiple armageddons simultaneously, imminently.

The atheistic/materialistic worldview has devolved into a godless cynicism marked by a hubris wholly devoid of humility, grace, decency, empathy, etc. Correction of this to something nobler and more humane clearly requires a willingness to again embrace and revere these immeasurable, non-commodifiable properties of existence that are clearly evident throughout nature, not least in the nihilistic depression that takes hold when all trust and decency departs. This yearning need for something truly healthy and beautiful is the unstoppable force now crashing against the immovable object of entrenched Western power. But Western power will break. How much damage the West will do is open to discussion, but the West will break. My hope is that in its ruins a sufficient number of Western survivors recognise the need for decency, empathy, etc., and work hard to build the next round of good times that could lift us into a better Western civilisation than all previous versions. 

Unimportant at this stage are arguments about the Best Governance System. What we need is a rediscovery of how to honour mutual empathy and respect, especially in the West. 

I have argued here that nothingness, as death, lies at the heart of humanist materialism, which is often touted as hard-nosed realism. It is in fact a negative romanticism, a kind of nihilistic reluctance to accept limits. It began with the giddy excitement that the universe, as a machine, was there for the taking, for the perfecting, ours to reshape as the fancy took us. This paradigmatic vector is now long past its honeymoon period, far into late old age and decrepitude. By way of thought experiment, I hope the examination herein of the impossibility of nothingness – of death – and how this impacts on our sense of what is humanly possible with regards to human suffering and historical cyclicality, could be one fillip to taking more seriously the love-wisdom-health trinity we will need to respect again if we are to pass successfully beyond this incredibly challenging transition.