The Descent of Humanity

Here is a question worth pondering: what will we tell future generations in 10-30 years from now? How will we explain the world that they will inherit from us?

Based on our current trajectory, there will be only one honest answer to this question: we failed you; we refused to act despite knowing what would happen; we were overwhelmed by the problems that we created; we traded your safety for our comfort; we are sorry!

In this essay, I will try to explain how we got to this point, and how it will most likely pan out over the next few decades. If this makes you sad, or angry, or leave you in a state of despair then that’s a good thing, because that’s the right emotional response from a human being who has not completely lost their humanity. But rest assured there is hope beyond the dark clouds of uncertainty, though it will be unlike anything you might imagine.

Life as a Story

Our life is best seen as a story – a story that we tell ourselves and believe in, a story that we pass on to our children and condition them to believe in, a story that we live on a daily basis. The story shapes our lives, it shapes our thinking and beliefs, it structures our daily routines, it makes us who we are and who we become. But no story is eternal. There comes a time when a story no longer serves its purpose. At that point, the old story needs to be replaced by a new story that can guide us to a new future. Clinging to an old story that is no longer valid is detrimental, wasteful, even dangerous.

It’s hard to pinpoint when our current story began. Was it the dawn of industrial civilisation? Was it the invention of agriculture? Or does it go back even further to the discovery of fire and invention of the earliest tools? Regardless, our current story is characterised by incremental steps in gaining more and more control over the natural world. We have run this story very close to its logical conclusion. Our footprint is everywhere. We have changed the face of our home planet beyond recognition. We have extracted and consumed her resources at an accelerating pace. We have destroyed the natural habitats of other species and driven so many to the brink of permanent extinction. We have reduced the biodiversity that all living forms (including us) depend upon for survival. We have polluted our lands and oceans. We have destroyed our sources of fresh water. We have disturbed the fine balance of gases in our atmosphere. We have behaved as if our actions have no consequence, as if resources are infinite, as if our story can run forever.

Socioeconomics

Since our early days, we have experimented with a variety of socioeconomic and living arrangements, including hunter gathering, tribalism, bartering, monetary systems, feudalism, slavery, industrialisation, fascism, capitalism, socialism, communism, to name a few. Of everything that we have tried, one development stands out as the most influential in enabling us to exercise control over the natural world: scientific technology. Scientific discovery has always been a noble goal for us. It has served us well in our curiosity to better understand the world around us. It has liberated us from ignorance, superstition, and dogma. With every new scientific discovery came the opportunity to develop better tools, more efficient ways of doing things, and more accurate means of predicting outcomes. Technological advancement is a direct consequence of scientific progress. Inevitably, this led to inventions for harnessing the latent energy of fossil fuels, which magnified our limited muscle energy by orders of magnitude.

The modern world around us has been built with and operates on fossil fuels and technology. That includes our towns and cities, our homes, our places of work, our transportation systems, our electricity grid, our farms, our factories, our means of communication (including the Internet), even our entertainment. Go to any supermarket and pick any item (including fresh produce) and you can trace its production back to fossil fuels. The average person naively thinks that vehicles and planes are the main consumers of fossil fuels and that converting transportation to solar energy would liberate us from fossil fuel dependency. The truth is that transportation is a small part of the dependency and in many ways the easiest one to replace. We have numerous other dependencies that are less visible. In practical terms, our current societies are so deeply dependent on fossil fuels that eliminating the latter will result in social collapse within a few days.

Ecology

Man-made ecological degradation has given rise to movements to elevate our awareness of the problem and call us to action. This is a positive step, but after decades of trying, it’s obvious that it has had insignificant impact. I could get into a detailed explanation of why that’s the case, but that would be beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice to say that we dug ourselves into a hole and continued digging until we lost the ability to climb out.

The science behind climate change is solid and irrefutable. Yet, there is no shortage of morons and psychopaths that choose to ignore it or, even worse, deny it. Some of our so-called political leaders are in that camp. And those leaders who believe in it only pay lip service to it out of political expedience or the realisation that under the current socioeconomic arrangement the problem is simply insolvable. The outcome is kicking the can down the road, leaving it to the next group or next generation to pick up the pieces.

The IPCC is the official UN body for publishing data on climate change. Every year, observed reality turns out to be worse than their prediction. By all indications, their models are too conservative or too simplistic. Earth’s climate is very complex due to its numerous feedback loops. It’s unlikely we will ever discover all these feedback loops and add them to the climate models. Therefore, it’s a safe bet that the climate will deteriorate faster than even the most accurate models and predictions. We’re now hearing warnings about how we have only a decade or so left to act, but I’m inclined to believe the less optimistic view that we have already gone past the point of no return, meaning that regardless of what we do now and how much we cut back emissions, the climate will continue to spin out of balance, and we will reach the dangerous threshold of 4 degrees Celsius warming and likely even exceed that. The point that’s often overlooked is that there is a long time-lag between cutting back emissions (even down to zero) and any material change of warming trend. A simple analogy can illustrate this. Imagine a train travelling at high speed. If the driver observes a section of the track missing 20 meters ahead, hitting the brake will not save the train from derailment, as the train’s momentum will carry it a lot farther than that before it comes to a halt.

Technotopia

If we are to chart a course for a new future then we need to first understand how we arrived at the current situation. In other words, unless we fully understand the flaws of our current story, we won’t be able to imagine a new story that addresses them.

I haven’t been able to find a term that can adequately capture our situation, so I’ve devised one: technotopia. I will now try to explain what it means, how it has shaped our current story, and why it’s a dead-end.

There is no doubt that technology has served us well in many walks of life. It has made our lives easier and protected us against many challenges that early societies had to face: hunger, disease, short life span, immobility, insecurity, discomfort, uncertainty, etc. Without these benefits, we would have never adopted technology or invested in its continued development. Our adoption of technology can be explained as rational behaviour – more of a beneficial thing is evidently desirable.

But, like so many other things in life, technology is a double-edged sword – every benefit comes with a cost. The problem is that the benefits are immediately obvious, but the costs are often harder to observe, either because they’re out of view, delayed, or too subtle to be seen. There are numerous examples of this: combustion engine, antibiotics, mechanised farming, nuclear energy, solar panels, GM crops, asbestos products, to name but a few. By the time we realise the downside of a technology – its true cost – it’s often too late, because by then we’ve become highly dependent on it through massive sunk investment and widespread social adoption. Our historical way of dealing with this problem has been to assume that further technological innovation can solve the problems created by earlier technologies. This optimism is born out of how miraculous some earlier technologies have been in addressing very difficult problems, which has persuaded us to believe that if we put enough effort into it, we can solve any problem with technology, no matter how difficult.

For most of the twentieth century, especially after World War II, humanity was led to believe in a bright future where no problem would be out of reach of technological solution. By extrapolating past successes, we could visualise a future where there would be a cure for every conceivable disease, so much automation that no one would have to work anymore, peace and harmony throughout the world, and humanity spreading to other planets in the solar system or even beyond. In other words, utopia!

This optimism (or rather, blind faith) held true till late twentieth century when we began to witness the limitations of technological reach. We failed to find a cure for cancer, while new incurable diseases such as HIV began to emerge, and some of the old diseases that had been eradicated resurfaced. Chernobyl and, more recently, Fukushima demonstrated that there was no safe way of harnessing nuclear energy. The miracle of plastics turned into the nightmare of polluted oceans because of which, plastics found their way into the food chain and therefore into our bodies. This combined with the widespread use of chemicals, heavy metals, and other pollutants has led to an alarming increase in allergies, auto immune diseases, autism, cancer, and various other ailments.

We have arrived at a point in our technological development that the problem of diminishing returns cannot be ignored. At the same time, the deferred cost of earlier progress is catching up with us in form of biosphere degradation and climate change. Our response is to do the only thing we know how to do – develop more technology – because that’s all that we have faith in, it’s all that our current story tells us to believe in.

This is what I mean by technotopia – a widely held belief that all that we need in order to reach our vision of utopia is more technological innovation.

Although the shiny veneer of this assumption is eroding fast, it still serves as a powerful marketing tool. Some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of global economy have built careers out of it and accumulated immense monetary wealth. For example, Elon Musk would have you believe that Tesla batteries and cars can solve energy storage and transportation problems, and that his SpaceX technology will create a permanent human settlement on Mars. What he won’t tell you is that without fossil fuels, all his ventures are toast, or that his products use non-renewable materials, take massive amounts of fossil fuels to manufacture, are energy intensive to recycle, and highly damaging to the environment. In other words, he brags about the benefits and keeps the true costs out of view. That he is widely regarded as a visionary and role model should tell you how irrelevant our current story has become.

We have more man-made problems than any other point in our history, almost all of which are the result of technotopia. And yet we insist on creating more technology to address them. You have all heard the current buzzwords: artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, nuclear fusion, quantum computing, carbon capture, etc.

‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,’ Albert Einstein said decades ago. That sums up the futility of our approach.

Root Cause

We should wonder about the root cause of our problem. How did we get into this mode of thinking where the harder we try to fix our problems, the worse they become?

Is the inherent problem one of ideology? There are those who’ve been arguing that Capitalism is the root cause of all this. I disagree. There is no doubt that as an economic system, Capitalism is destined to eat itself out, but that doesn’t validate alternative ideologies, such as Marxism, which also embrace the technotopia mindset, albeit under different economic arrangements. At the other end of the spectrum, there are ideologies (e.g., primitivism) that argue that we should abandon all technology and live as our primitive ancestors did. But that’s merely infantile thinking that denies our evolutionary destiny of rising consciousness.

I submit to you that the root cause of our problem is not of ideological nature but psychological.

The rise of consciousness, technology, culture, and ego has been simultaneous and reinforcing, with a profound impact on the modern human psyche. The modern psyche is in sharp contrast to the psyche of earlier indigenous cultures (e.g., North American Indians, Innuits, Australian Aborigines, many African traditions). To these cultures, there is no clear distinction between subject and object, between observer and observed. Everything is interconnected in a sacred web of life. Everything is part of a greater whole that transcends one’s understanding.

Indigenous cultures are often called primitive because they used primitive forms of technology, but their psyches were far better suited to living in harmony with the natural world than ours. To them, everything that nature offers is a gift; to us, it’s a resource. To them, a gift is received only when it’s needed and with deep gratitude; to us, a resource is to be taken for profit, with no limit based on one’s need.

As modern humans, we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the natural world. Furthermore, individually, we see ourselves as separate from other individuals. Separateness makes it possible to justify violence. You will not cut down a forest unless you see it as separate from you. You will not harm another human being unless you see them as separate from you. How else could we justify our centuries of violence against nature, our bloody wars between nation states, our cruelty against other sentient beings?

Unlike an adult, an infant has a whole and undifferentiated psyche – no ego has been formed yet – therefore the infant sees itself as one with the rest of the world around it. As the infant interacts with the world, especially other humans, the ego is formed through a process of social conditioning. Behaviours that are not socially acceptable are discouraged and those that are socially acceptable are allowed. This differentiation prepares the child to become a member of the community. This is a necessary development in any cultural setting but creates an unavoidable problem where the psyche is split into two parts: the ego (the part that we’re conscious of – the ‘I’) and the unconscious (everything else about us that we remain unaware of, including who we truly are – the ‘self’ – and those qualities that have been repressed through social conditioning – the ‘shadow’).

This split, though a necessary step in our development, makes us dangerous to ourselves and to the rest of the world, because it opens the door to imbalances that can and do manifest as neurotic and psychotic behaviours. This is the fundamental root cause of technotopia and all its disastrous consequences.

Indigenous cultures the world over have been well aware of the dangers of a split psyche and devised practices to keep it in check. Although the exact details of these practices vary across cultures, the principles and intents are much the same. These cultures recognise the fact that the ego formed during childhood is inadequate to carry the child into adulthood. Therefore, around the age of puberty, an adolescent is put through a culturally devised ordeal (a vision quest) to connect to their true ‘self’ and find their purpose for their next stage of life. The ordeal involves a symbolic death of the infantile ego so that a new identity can emerge that can serve the community and honour the sacred nature of life. This process is facilitated by elders who have a deep understanding of the necessary steps in reaching maturity.

As civilisations grew and people moved into town and cities, these practices were abandoned in favour of curriculum-based schooling because the latter better serves the interests of technotopia. Fast forward to now and there is a total absence of elders in our communities. Transition to adulthood is based on age or completing school education, and celebrated in form of an eighteenth or twenty-first birthday party. This is a complete mockery of true transition, the result of which is immature ‘adults’ who carry their infantile psychic baggage for the rest of their lives.

The symptoms of bypassing proper transition to adulthood are everywhere and we all suffer from it – lack of true purpose in life, anxiety, depression, sense of insecurity, jobs that give us no satisfaction, no sense of community, feeling lost, meaningless existence. Inevitably, these feeling manifest themselves in dysfunctional behaviours – alcohol and drug abuse, addiction to distractions and entertainment, antisocial behaviour, graffiti, neighbourhood gangs, violence. Immature and unable to integrate our shadows, we project our dark side onto the other, both at an individual level and, collectively, as a social group or nation. We marginalise and direct our hate towards the opposite sex, other colour, other race, other religious beliefs, other nations, or any other quality repressed in our shadow.

The elders of indigenous cultures have been replaced by modern-day imposters in form of political leaders, captains of industry, business celebrities, Hollywood celebrities, sports celebrities, super models, social media influencers with millions of followers, or even environmental crusaders, none of whom have grown out of their infantile ego or dealt with their shadow. Technotopia would have us believe that these are our leaders and role models, as if a position of power, or obscene wealth, or media-instigated popularity, or any other form of attaining fame is a passport to maturity. Why do the public look up to these imposters? Can it be that they have never come across a true elder or experienced a true community?

Despite the riches and glamour and comfort promised by technotopia, we remain impoverished and unaware of our impoverishment. Technotopia has no solution for our spiritual dilemma but offers plenty of irrelevant band aides and distractions to help numb the pain.

New Story

If our old story is coming to an end, what will be our new story and what kind of future will it create?

No one knows for sure, but it’s a story that we’ll have to weave together. It is not a responsibility that we can hand over to any individual or group to imagine for us. It is our collective story, and we all need to be in it. In the theatre of real life, we’re all players and there is no room for spectators. It’s a daunting task but it’s a task that we must undertake – our future, our survival depends on it.

Although the new story remains to be collectively weaved, glimpses of the kind of future we could hope for is already within the reach of our imagination. First and foremost, we must recognise our connectedness and accept our true nature of being one, that is, an inseparable part of a universal mystery called life that is beyond our comprehension. We must listen to the deepest voice within us that we became deaf to while growing up, telling us the enteral truth of who we are. Each of us carries a unique gift and our purpose should be to discover that gift and live it fully. This is a personal journey that demands humility, sacrifice, humiliation, and pain. Death of ego, even symbolic death, can be very painful and requires immense courage.

We can look forward to our value systems completely transformed. True wealth will be in relationships – in relatedness – not just between humans but equally in our relationship to the natural world. As humans, we’re fully capable of falling in love with a river, a tree, a blade of glass, a rock, or even a breeze. Everything within our experience will be understood as sacred and honoured as such. We will realise that utopia (in any form conceived by culture) is a mirage and simply not required for a meaningful existence.

In Between Stories

Where we are now can be described as in between two stories – an old one that’s dying and a new one that’s emerging. Expect this to be a difficult place, full of uncertainty, doubt, fear, remorse, and instability.

Just as an individual’s old ego must die so that a new more mature one can emerge, our collective narrative must die to make room for a new one. We’re already seeing signs of it in the external world where a perfect storm of multiple crises is brewing. Chances are that internally you’ve had fleeting glimpses of it too. I’m referring to that uneasy gutfeel that creeps upon you and tells you that the world is broken, that there is no conceivable way out of this spiritual crisis, that life has lost its purpose and meaning.

The technotopia that we have invested so much to create is unsustainable and will therefore die, regardless of how we act. We have two opposing choices. We can continue to invest in sustaining it and thus delay its collapse. That will not change the outcome but will make the collapse even more painful. Alternatively, we can accept our fate, let it collapse, and trust that after the dust settles, a more beautiful world will emerge. I believe that when we finally reach the other side, we will look back and see technotopia not as a complete mistake, despite all its ills and challenges, but as an evolutionary step. Consciousness can only grow through the life-and-death cycle, and this will be remembered as just another turn of the cycle.

For centuries, humanity has been ascending and, in the process, achieving wonders – enlightenment through science, incredible expressions in music, literature, painting and many other forms of art, philosophical thoughts of eternal endurance, and many other incredible achievements. This is the treasure that we must carry forward as we descend into the abyss before us. Our future is on the other side of the abyss. Even galaxies and stars are governed by death and rebirth. We’re far more feeble to escape that fate.