Aggressive Insecurity

Humanity has, at scale and en masse, a profoundly insecure dependency on aggressive self-determination. This is the great unaddressed issue of our historical moment, perhaps of history more generally, and may indeed be an undecidable problem.

We may not be able to unambiguously determine causal factors or clarify many of the things we really could or should be discussing and, to be quite honest, this is clearly one of our most significant collective challenges. Almost all of our other human-generated problems stem from this insecure narrative dynamic. If this makes you uncomfortable, it probably should, as this is the lived experience of an autonomously self-propagating “edge of chaos” that inhabits (and compels) us every bit as much as we inhabit it.

A philosopher might ask, “when did war start?” Reflection reveals that communicative insecurity is the essence of adaptive cultural, political, and adversarial complexity. A cybernetician might ask, how does this happen and what are the measurable forces, feedback loops and self-regulatory functions in play? The rest of us are left, exasperated and exhausted by all of this internecine belligerence, to simply ask: “why?”