•  
Support crystalwind.ca with your donation and help spread spirituality and positivity. Blessings!

This article was posted by CrystalWind.ca.

A+ A A-

Senseless Behaviour

lotq sipress dog paper

When you put too many rats together in a confined space in conditions of scarcity for a prolonged period, you get what appears to be highly dysfunctional behaviour — a spike in extreme violence, obsessive hoarding, top-down abuse from throughout the group hierarchy, anomie and suicide at the bottom of the hierarchy, abandonment of family, and ultimately killing and eating of the (weaker) young. What had evolved as a mostly-peaceful, sensible and sustainable group culture crumbles and collapses.

Five years ago I argued that there is no reason to believe human cultures should be any different. What Dmitry Orlov describes as the five stages of cultural collapse resonates almost eerily with Edward Hall’s description of the collapse in overcrowded rat societies.

Since I wrote that, my worldview has changed considerably. As I’ve explained elsewhere, I no longer believe we have the free will or agency (individually or collectively) to change our innate and enculturated behaviours.

So how does one explain the phenomenon of collapse in light of evolutionary theory? And what does this mean for the future of our species and planet?

It seems to me that cultural collapse is essentially the collapse of order into chaos. It takes an enormous amount of energy (in every sense) to maintain order, so ultimately collapse back into unorder (entropy) is inevitable. The astonishing evolution of a staggeringly complex, highly-ordered, diverse, self-sustained balance of life and environment on Earth was, if you buy Gaia theory, equally inevitable. So at many, many different scales evolution is essentially a lovely, eternal succession of waves of increasing complexity and then falling away (collapse, or devolution) into unordered chaos.

What happens at the point of collapse? There is no longer energy (food, fitness, force etc) to sustain the highly-ordered complexity that has been built up. Behaviours that had evolved over millennia to fit with the rest of the ecosystem and the environment suddenly no longer ‘work’. Is the increased aggression and hoarding of the alphas, the eating of the young and the depression and suicide of the lower-downs in the hierarchy (of rats, or humans) an attempt to enable a small number of alphas to survive once it’s realized (at least subconsciously) that the culture as a whole cannot hold? That’s an interesting theory, but it seems more likely to me that what we’re witnessing is just chaotic behaviour — instincts that evolved for one situation being applied (largely inappropriately and dysfunctionally) in a situation the creature (and the group) had never experienced and were clueless to know how to deal with. It is, in essence, senseless behaviour.

The evidence of financial, commercial, political and social collapse (Dmitry’s first four stages) has never been more obvious or abundant than what we have seen in recent months. What we are seeing is the desperate theft by the rich from the poor on a massive scale (the alpha rats hoarding, using offshore tax havens and buying up land in Hawai’i and New Zealand to escape to when living in the cities is no longer viable).

Mostly what we are seeing, everywhere, from the streets to the centres of power, is unprecedented rage.

We see it in the butchery by machete of nearly a million Rwandans by their neighbours. We have seen it in the staggering and nearly-unquestioned (at the time) cruelty exhibited in concentration camps since the dawn of civilization but increasingly as our human population has soared toward eight billion. We see it in monstrous factory farms where acts of unspeakable confinement and cruelty are meted out on a massive scale away from public scrutiny. We saw it in the multi-millionaire Las Vegas gambling addict/real-estate speculator’s shooting frenzy. We continue to see it in the multi-millionaire New York gambling addict/real-estate speculator’s tauntings on Twitter, while we continue to believe, astonishingly and nonsensically, that neither he nor his equally-deranged Pyongyang counterpart, will actually push the button that will bring civilization to a close much quicker than either economic meltdown or climate change could. And we’re all deranged by this culture.

Meanwhile, the US has more guns than people, many of which are or quickly could be converted to instruments of mass destruction. Our civilization is built (with the best of intentions) on the concentration of wealth and power and the capacity to wield it over those lower in the hierarchy, to keep us civilized, domesticated, to keep us, like the lower-hierarchy rats in the overcrowded cages, obedient, cowering in fear, driven to do as we are told by anxiety and adrenaline, and addicted and medicated the rest of our lives with dopamine-fuelled escapes we call “entertainment”.

This is final-stage collapse. We are just so used to the fear, the oppression, the obscene inequality of wealth and power, the corruption, the incarceration, the constantly but scarcely suppressed rage, that we can’t see it; it’s the only life we have known.

I would suggest that this collapse actually began to occur with the invention (which was essential for our species’ survival during past sudden climate changes that created severe scarcity) of the arrowhead and (what Richard Manning has appropriately called “catastrophic”) agriculture — unnatural patches of monoculture crops and confined animals maintained by constant high-energy interventions (work drudgery). The next essential inventions were settlement and (complex, abstract) language, and voila! — civilization culture. In short, I would suggest that civilization is a fascinating but ultimately unsustainable experiment in managing scarcity. We are not ‘meant’ to be (not naturally adapted to) living that way. And while the span of civilization is only a few millennia (an instant in geological time), since we have known nothing else, we are as ill-equipped to deal with (or prevent) its collapse as the clueless rats faced with sudden unnatural scarcity in their hopeless cages. In Darwinian terms we are not ‘fit’ to cope with it.

When you believe, as I do, that we do not have ‘free will’ to do other than what these bodies we presume to inhabit were going to do anyway, given the circumstances of the moment, what do you tell all the rats scurrying around desperately in the cage, acting more and more dysfunctionally?

You don’t tell them anything. For me, and perhaps for some of you, it is better, and enough, to know, to have made some sense of what is, than to just be bewildered (or disappointed) by everything horrific that’s happening. This is only a theory of course. I’m still anxious about it, hopelessly hopeful about changing it, escaping it. But somehow I feel a bit better with this ghastly theory. This corner of the cage is a little more comfortable, a little quieter, than it might have been otherwise.

Source Here - Dave Pollard's chronicle of civilization's collapse, creative works and essays on our culture. A trail of crumbs, runes and exclamations along my path in search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

Pin It

© CrystalWind.ca 2024. All content (articles, imagery, fair use) & design protected. Written permission required for copying. All rights reserved.

Join the Conversation Now! Comment Below! arrow down small 11

CrystalWind.ca is free to use because of donations from people like you. Please help support us! 
Blessings!

Follow this blog

Thank You for Visiting CrystalWind!

We're grateful for your presence and hope you found inspiration for your awakening journey.

Share your thoughts with us at  -
let's awaken and transform together!

crystal-wind-oracle-mobile-app
Cut Through The Illusions!
Available On
Apple  | Android | Amazon
NEW Expanded Version - 53 cards!

Spirit Animal Totem Of The Day!

CrystalWind.ca is free to use because of
donations from people like you.
Donate Now »

CrystalWind.ca Donation!

Unlock Your Light: Join Lightworkers Worldwide on CrystalWind.ca!

 

Call For Writers

Call For Writers!

Follow Us!

 

Who is Online Now

We have 24337 guests and no members online

Featured This Month

Page:

Sagittarius Mythology

Sagittarius Mythology

The Sagittarius Myth Other than Virgo, the Sagittarius myth is probably the... Read more

Sagittarius

Sagittarius

Nov 22 - Dec 21 Spirit: Meeting competition Ego: Independent, studious, in... Read more

Sun in Sagittarius

Sun in Sagittarius

An Overview of Sun Sign Characteristics for Sagittarius At the heart of Sagit... Read more

Turquoise

Turquoise

The Master Healer Stone As a blue stone with a hint of green, turquoise wor... Read more

Birth Totem - Owl

Birth Totem - Owl

Birth Totem Owl Birth dates: November 23 - December 21 Birth Totem: Owl Read more

Winter Solstice - A Season of Giving

Winter Solstice - A Season of Giving

CELEBRATING THE WINTER SOLSTICE The December solstice is also known as the ... Read more

Twas The Night Before Yuletide

Twas The Night Before Yuletide

Yule Chant Brightly burns the Yule log tonight Magic dances in firelight Ho... Read more

Yule Blessings

Yule Blessings

Yule The Winter Solstice or Yule is one of the Lesser Wiccan Sabbats, and it ... Read more

Gods and Monsters of the Winter Solstice

Gods and Monsters of the Winter Solstice

La Befana Because Santa Claus has presided over the Yule festival for the las... Read more

Long Snows Moon

Long Snows Moon

Elk – Obsidian – Black Spruce – Black November 22 to December 21 The Long ... Read more

Sodalite

Sodalite

The Logic Stone Sodalite works well in unison with the throat and brow chak... Read more

Obsidian

Obsidian

The Protection Stone As a stone that emerges with dramatic force from the d... Read more

Yule - The Winter Solstice

Yule - The Winter Solstice

Yule, or the Winter Solstice is one of the lesser Sabbats of the Witches calen... Read more

Yule By The Hedgewitch

Yule By The Hedgewitch

Yule Yule is a solar festival and one of the Minor Sabbats. This is when the ... Read more

Yule

Yule

Yule Ritual Celebrated on the Winter Solstice, around December 21 each year.... Read more

© 2008-2025 CrystalWind.ca. All rights reserved. Site Creation by CrystalWind.ca.
Web Hosting by Knownhost.com

 

 

X

Right Click

No right click