The question is whether civilisation can preserve its capacity to continue without making recurrent destruction the principal instrument of its renewal.
Tag: civilisation
We are not outside the world we are trying to understand. We are (all) implicated in its disorders, participants in its reproduction, and responsible for what happens next.
We have become exceptionally capable of reproducing (our, collective) insecurity in the name of security.
The climate is not obliged to change at a pace convenient to those living within it.
Categories
Technocracy: Addicted to Risk
We have constructed a civilisation in which recognising existential risk has become another reason to continue producing it.
Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.
Civilisations persist by continually reorganising themselves. The unanswered question is whether conflict, crisis and systemic collapse/renewal remain the principal means through which that persistence is achieved.
Categories
outer limits: impredicativity
Every explanation of reality becomes another part of the reality left to explain:
E(R) ∈ R → E(R) ≠ R.
The world is not merely broken. Too many people are paid to keep it that way.
The objective function of civilisation is not wealth, growth or power. It is the continual reproduction of the conditions that make civilisation itself possible.
