Dear Diary:
I’m afraid that we’re missing the boat. In all the confusion in today’s world, we are missing what’s driving the confusion. We’re all preoccupied with the dazzling crazy symptoms, so much so that we can’t look away and beyond the superficial to the deeper root causes.
What is driving everyone crazy with information overload, misinformation, disinformation, FOMO, imposter syndrome, cognitive fatigue, decision fatigue and fatigue fatigue, is something that requires distance, perspective, calm reflection, and deliberation.
There is one root cause, albeit abstract cause, that is driving everything that is driving us all crazy. It is the rapid pace of progress. We have too many opportunities, so many that we can’t just pick one and invest sufficient time and effort to drive it through to fruition. We’re distracted by emerging opportunities all around us, including the opportunity to see what the other 8 billion humans have to say about things on social media.
We have billions of challenges too. So many we’re overwhelmed with a sense of pointlessness, utter defeat. We were born to make a difference, to add value in this world, but every time we turn to do something it seems futile. There are too many twists and turns, too many complications to find a positive outcome.
It didn’t happen overnight. It took at least the last 500 years to reach this apex, this tipping point of development. One can trace these historical points of high leverage, such as early global trade missions, cross-cultural learning and adoption, incorporation, the printing press, the stock markets, public education, discovery of the laws of physics, automation and manufacturing economies of scale, discovery and harnessing of both fossil fuels and electricity, electronic mass communication, digital intelligence…
Each of these innovations produced compounding exponential growth of civil progress. Yet our brains, though better informed and educated, remain locked in biological status quo. Our brains were designed by countless eons of evolutionary trial and error to function in a small locale with enough food and water within walking distance, to work with about 150 to 200 family and friends we knew face to face, cradle to grave, in a community of trust and respect. Our social instincts served us well.
But through the past thousand years, various societies incrementally grew beyond that scale to gradually extend our social instincts artificially. We had religious and moral codes as aids to extend our empathy and compassion into the abstract to accommodate the strangers.
It happened one step at a time so we didn’t notice the bigger picture changing. Each new generation born into the emerging world took their starting point for granted as part of nature. But now we can look back and see that we weren’t the only civilization that suffered from success.
We now know of a couple dozen lost and forgotten but rediscovered civilizations. We know them by their artifacts, simpler ones burried deeper beneath later sophisticated ones. We find them under metres of soil, sand, roots of trees.
Studies in economics have shown that companies and governments alike are subject to diseconomies of scale. They are in fact not too big to fail, but actually fail because they are too big. In the corporate world this has been observed time after time for decades. But now we see that there is in fact a universal scaling law that applies to all organizations, all organisms, all physical structures, and… yes, all civilizations!
Eventually, all civilizations, if successful, will become so large and complex that they become unmanageable. Well, here we are!
The left-right political polarization, the ethnic cleansing, the coccooning behavior, the growing wealth gap, cancel culture, on and on, are symptoms of the simple fact of civil complexity. People are seeing the world from a safety point of view. They see evil enemies everywhere. That’s what our primitive instincts tell us, that there is a threatening presence here.
However, we may be the only civilization that has been able to uncover and learn from the mistakes of past civilizations. We have learned that history repeats itself, never perfectly, but persistently.
Let’s think about that for a moment. History repeats. It’s cyclical. Like a fractal unfolding.
Ah-ha! If everything is a fractal, then we can find a way to decipher the code of that fractal and thereby find the simplicity beneath the civil complexity. Deciphering that root fractal formula may not be so difficult. We know about balance, convergence and divergence, attraction and repulsion, approach and avoidance, love and hate. We know that the cosmos is logical, using both inductive an deductive processes to produce “negentropy” or intelligence, against the force of entropy.
If success has given us complexity, and too much complexity has given us failure, then maybe simplicity can keep progress alive against the current tendency toward civil entropy.
‘Nuf said.
Randal Adcock 