I’ve begrudgingly learned two hard-won lessons in humility so far in life: First, my youthful confidence in ‘fixing’ and ‘saving’ the world gave way to an understanding of how complex systems actually work: nature adapts through deep, redundant, interconnected processes that humans cannot control, copy, engineer, or outlast. Human attempts at efficiency, mastery, and rational design repeatedly fail against nature’s resilience and its unpredictable, unfathomable complexity. And human-built systems are inherently fragile, inflexible, require far more maintenance than we are capable of investing in them, and quickly and inevitably collapse over time, especially as they get large and unwieldy.
And second, I lost my faith in human agency to bring about positive change. Our behaviour I see now is not guided by reason or belief but is fully conditioned by biology, culture, and circumstance; beliefs merely justify actions after the fact. As a result, our personal ‘choices’ and intentions have no impact on our behaviour, and have never significantly affected anything. I no longer believe the world can be improved through ‘conscious’ effort or will, nor that we have any control whatsoever over our actions.
These are lessons of disillusionment that slowly ‘dawned’ on me. So now, in the same way that I’ve come to appreciate that the sun’s apparent revolving around the earth is an illusion, so too have I come to appreciate that human agency, free will, and capacity to control, sustain, and ‘improve upon’ vastly complex systems, both natural and man-made, are likewise illusory.
We are all just actors reading our given scripts, and helplessly watching everything unfold the only way it possibly could. Even worse, it’s these bodies we presume to inhabit that are the actors on stage, and ‘we’, our imagined selves, are just spectators, barking our endless distress and incomprehension from the stands.
These lessons have completely changed the ‘lens’ through which I see everything that’s happening in the world. I no longer believe it’s possible to escape from, mitigate in any way, or prepare for the collapse of industrial civilization. I no longer believe that praising, rewarding, blaming or punishing people for their actions is justifiable. And of course I no longer believe my own beliefs and behaviours are the result of any kind of self-directed program or process of “self-improvement”. They’re the inevitable result of my conditioning and the circumstances of the moment. The same as everyone else’s beliefs and behaviours.
And, perhaps ironically, my learning these very lessons was also entirely determined by my conditioning — who and what I was exposed to (including some of the world’s brightest thinkers about complexity and human agency). And, worse still, my conditioning still compels me to act as if I think something might be done about collapse, and as if I have the free will to do it. All rather mind-bending.
But not, at least in my case, either incapacitating or depressing — I’m reading and chronicling collapse, and enthusiastically exploring human agency and the deeper questions of the nature of reality and ‘consciousness’ as much as ever. And seemingly I’m happier than I’ve ever been — though perhaps that’s the result of being freed of the burden of believing I have the responsibility or capacity, commensurate with my great privilege, to do what I can do to prevent or mitigate collapse and war and other human atrocities and make the world a better place.
image by AI; my own prompt
