The Superorganism Explained in 7 Minutes

Jun 26, 2025

AI Overview

Nate Hagens discusses the concept of the “superorganism,” describing modern civilization as a complex, energy-driven system intertwined with Earth’s biosphere. He highlights the rapid depletion of fossil fuels, which has powered economic growth but also caused environmental damage. Hagens emphasizes the need for a shift from material expansion to community, connection, and purpose. He outlines four response categories: policy, biophysical realism, planning for resilience, and cultural change. Hagens argues that the Great Simplification is inevitable and calls for local resilience and community-based solutions to address the human predicament.

Transcript

Nate Hagens 0:00
Greetings. On this platform, the Great Simplification, we’re trying to change the initial conditions of the future by putting together a quite complex, wide boundary overview of the human predicament and how humans in the biosphere interrelate, and what are the underpinnings and the scenarios and the interventions.

0:25
It’s complex, it’s threatening. It is not for the faint of heart. So our audience isn’t everyone, and I was thinking about it this week. If you think of all 8 billion humans, a subset of those are those with the Internet. A subset of those are those that want to learn about the world and are curious. A subset of those are those that have a pro social, pro future outlook and would like to engage with the future and make not only their own lives better, but make society and the planet and the biosphere better than the default.

1:09
And so that’s quite already a small number of humans, but probably in the 10s of millions anyways. But then there’s another filter, which is the attention span. And a lot of people don’t have the attention span, including me, for a 90 minute podcast. I just don’t.

1:29
I can interview someone for 90 minutes or three and a half hours in Daniel Schmachtenberger case, but I’m too busy, and I just don’t have the attention span. I’m sure there are a lot of people, increasingly, a lot of people that fall into that category.

1:46
And so this message could be parsed into something shorter. So last week, I was in California doing kind of a pre TED Talk, sort of event called Ignite, and the challenge offered was, would you give a five minute talk? Nate, 20 slides? I’m like, sure I’d be happy to. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, because the 20 slides are auto timed at 15 seconds each, so it’s exactly five minutes, exactly 20 slides, exactly 15 seconds each. And I did one on the superorganism, the animations didn’t end up working.

2:25
So I’m taking this opportunity on this, Frankly, to redo the superorganism in seven minutes. But I’ve loosened the constraints on myself, and I think I have 25 or 26 slides, and some are longer than 15 seconds. So here goes the superorganism in seven minutes.

2:55
Modern civilization looks impressive and invincible. Markets grow, planes fly, artificial intelligence has arrived, but something doesn’t feel right. Beneath the surface, more vital signs are flashing red. There are lots of people working on cures, but we are mostly prescribing fixes without first diagnosing the underlying condition.

3:34
Most people narrowly believe money powers the world, but it’s really energy. Animals were the first investors spending some calories to gain more. This surplus energy built organisms, ecosystems, and eventually, human cultures and this civilization.

3:54
Two centuries ago, we tapped the stored energy of ancient sunlight in the form of coal, oil and gas. The oil in a single barrel combined with a machine, can do around five years of human labor for mere pennies, portable, concentrated, incredibly cheap magic.

4:14
This fossil jackpot underpins the phenomenon of the carbon pulse, a one time release of energy stored over geologic time. In under 200 years, we’ve burned what took millions to form. This wasn’t a paycheck, it was a trust fund with which we’ve been throwing a planet wide party.

4:35
When paired with machines, this huge energy surplus did wonders. Population, production and profits all soared, powered by an invisible fossil army, a half a trillion human workers strong. But such power came with blind spots. Our culture confused the tiny cost of fossil energy with its enormous value, and ignored the pollution impacts almost entirely.

5:03
We built a global economy fully dependent on these two hidden subsidies, without acknowledging them, without even seeing them. We remain today energy blind, mistaking financial and technological growth for progress and forgetting what enabled and powered it all.

5:21
In nature, complexity builds through flows of energy and materials. Forests, coral reefs, brains all emerge from this dynamic. Human systems are no exception. Cities, economies, technologies, all self organize as emergent structures powered by energy, shaped by matter.

5:43
The pursuit of energy in nature creates patterns. A single starling follows three simple rules: stay close to your neighbor, but not too close, and move towards the center. From these simple animal behaviors, a breathtaking shape, a murmuration appears in the sky — fluid, unpredictable and alive.

6:05
This is emergence in nature. Emergence happens in the human world too. Billions of individuals, businesses and nations, each follow simple cultural rules: seek profit, minimize cost, grow, all tethered to energy, materials and ecosystem impact. The result, global physical patterns no one designed, no one intended, and few are planning around.

6:31
Zoom out far enough, and human civilization itself starts to look and act like a giant organism with its own metabolism. Data flows echo neural signals. Highways and shipping lanes function like veins and arteries with gasoline and diesel as the blood, fractal nodes in a global system each year requiring a higher baseline metabolic requirement.

6:58
What has emerged is something new, something massive, a globally synchronized economic superorganism, built from energy machines and billions of human decisions, driven both by biological and cultural incentives, a mindless, unplanning, energy hungry superorganism.

7:21
This superorganism isn’t evil. It doesn’t feel, it doesn’t care about equity, ecology or human well being. It just optimizes for throughput, for scale, for more, even when more becomes the problem. There is no mastermind at the wheel, just billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption.

7:44
We’ve inadvertently built a system that rewards material expansion, not wisdom, and we’ve outsourced our decision making to markets and algorithms. As a result, in the past 30 years, we have consumed more energy and materials than all humans before us combined.

8:04
Our current culture feels like it will continue forever, but infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. No energy surplus, no economy. And technology on its own won’t save us because it runs on the same fuel and has the same master.

8:22
The superorganism cannot see what’s coming. It doesn’t anticipate. It only reacts and the signals. It reacts to profits, prices, ignore the deeper, long term risks. So far, our collective response to limits has been to go deeper into ecological and biophysical debt. Buy now, pay later at a planetary scale.

8:46
The Buy Now Pay Later is now in full effect. When central banks print money, they are not printing oil, copper or lithium, they’re printing claims on them. We can double the money supply, but the fossil fuels, the forest, the metals, the orangutans, they haven’t changed.

9:04
The financial system assumes endless growth. But the physical world, both the sources and the sink have limits. For over two centuries, growth has been our default, fueled by energy abundance and amplified by financial systems, but we’re now hitting ecological, energetic and social constraints.

9:25
The cultural story of more is colliding with physical reality. What if more money doesn’t help but just accelerates our transmutation of non renewable wealth into temporary income? The upslope of the carbon pulse, brought growth and complexity.

9:44
On the downslope, the inverse will happen. Less energy, less complexity, less more. A Great Simplification is not a maybe, it’s a when. The economic superorganism is not something humans planned for, nor wanted. It is an emergent phenomenon of large numbers of social primates interacting with large energy surplus without a map.

10:11
Downstream of aggregate behavior as individuals, humans continue to seek the emotional states that served our ancestors, but we now live in a world of scale, speed and stimulation they never faced. We’re a species far out of context, but we’re not just individuals. We’re deeply social animals. Our values and behaviors adapt to our cultural environment, and culture can change, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. It is in our wiring to shift once the story shifts too.

10:46
Here’s the hopeful twist. The things that truly bring us joy and meaning are not tied to material consumption. Once our basic human needs are met, what fulfills us is ancient: connection, purpose, time in nature, being in service. Humans don’t need endless growth to live rich, meaningful lives.

11:08
So what can we do as this superorganism reaches old age? Responses fall into four broad categories: policy, biophysical realism, planning for bending not breaking, and the Great Simplification.

11:37
We can’t easily steer or stop the economic superorganism, but we can see what comes next. Each of us can be the mitochondria in the cells of a different social organism being born in the not too distant future, in communities, in bio regions, in gatherings across the world.

11:57
It’s already happening. The stakes have never been higher for humans and for the biosphere. Power scales up, energy, money, control, hierarchy. Life scales deep: interconnection, regeneration, community. The future depends on which of these we feed.

12:18
This isn’t just a crisis, it is a rite of passage for Homo sapiens, the superorganism we are part of today, is not our destiny as a species, but a fork in a long road. So start the conversation. Build local resilience. Consider being B+ in service of life. Join those shifting the story. Participate in the coming Great Simplification. Thank you.

12:44
Whoops, I went over seven minutes. Quelle surprise, but this is the challenge.

12:52
This was just a primer of the human predicament. My college course was 100 hours. The reality 101, course that we’re putting together this summer is going to be eight to 10 hours. There was a huge amount that was left unsaid.

13:08
Every sentence in what I just did could have been unpacked for a half hour, horizontally and vertically, with with supporting points. The reality, the systemic reality our culture is grappling with isn’t conducive to the sound bites and stimulation and gotcha that dominate our current Internet.

13:33
And that’s part of our problem. Our culture has come to favor short, simple explanations when the reality is nuanced, complex and extremely serious and a bit distressing and abstract with no easy answers, etc. So I am confident, which is why I’m doing this work, that over time, the truth, which is the systems science, integration of our reality can help us meet the future halfway.

14:08
And we’re going to continue to work on that on this platform with different length videos, probably longer form content. And there are a lot of humans around the world that are hungry to understand what our situation is and how to engage to make the future better than the default more soon. Thank you.

Response

The shorter of it is helpful. Nate has 86K subscribers. Approximately 68% of the global population has internet access. In 2024, this figure represented around 5.5 billion people online. Considering offerings in English via machine translation is possible. So Nate has about 0.0015% of potential subscribers, of which more (0.00214%) have listened to/read a transcript of this episode.

Nate’s 1900 words are a message shaped by the subscribers/students/listeners and guests on the 180 episodes (300+ hours of conversations and reflections) of the Great Simplification (Nate’s feel-better view of what may better be called the Great Selection in our past’s future). Nate has become a public intellectual, which is why I mostly stopped following his offerings even though I continue to feature them.

Being a successful professor, author, podcaster, videographer, savant, thought leader… involves telling modern humans what they can hear (and Like, Share, read/listen to more than sentence or so of one offering). When Nate was writing for the Oil Drum he was less constrained by consensus thinking and so of more potential value/interest. In the affairs of the truth seeking, nothing fails like popular success. Sorry about that.

Nate has great interest in listening to and spreading Daniel Schmachtenberger’s words that mimic his own. Feeding an AI Nate all of Nate’s words/visuals would create the same effect — quite pointlessly.

Just because I’m easily distracted, I’ll annotate Nate’s transcript. [My added bits are in brackets, and reading them is a waste of your time — go ahead, prove me wrong. My followers number about 0.00000002%, i.e. not significantly different from Nate’s.]

Transcript

[I mostly sing along with Nate’s diagnosis, so for the shorter of it, skip to 07:44 or search for ‘[‘. I’ll put my added words, words, words, in boldface just because.]

Nate Hagens 0:00
Greetings. On this platform, the Great Simplification, we’re trying to change the initial conditions of the future by putting together a quite complex, wide boundary overview of the human predicament and how [modern] humans in the biosphere interrelate, and what are the underpinnings and the scenarios and the interventions.

0:25
It’s complex, it’s threatening. It is not for the faint of heart. So our audience isn’t everyone, and I was thinking about it this week. If you think of all 8 billion [modern] humans, a subset of those are those with the Internet. A subset of those are those that want to learn about the world and are curious. A subset of those are those that have a pro social, pro future outlook and would like to engage with the future and make not only their own lives better, but make society and the planet and the biosphere better than the default. [Modern humans cannot make the planet or the biosphere better. We modern humans can only manage/limit our demands on Nature’s resources by ceasing to be metastatic moderns — we can only systemically manage ourselves, not the world system.]

1:09
And so that’s quite already a small number of humans, but probably in the 10s of millions anyways [82 million = 1%, perhaps a 3x order of magnitude error]. But then there’s another filter, which is the attention span. And a lot of people don’t have the attention span, including me, for a 90 minute podcast. I just don’t.

3:18
The patient is now the fully coupled system of the global human economy and Earth’s biosphere. The symptoms we’re seeing and feeling do make sense once we zoom out and see how the whole system fits together [assuming modern humans have that potential — sane humans can only partially see (glimpse hints of) the immensity of what they don’t see, and the error, ignorance, and illusions through which they see what they think they correctly see].

3:34
Most people [of the monetary culture] narrowly believe money powers the world, but it’s really energy. Animals were the first investors spending some calories to gain more. This surplus energy built organisms, ecosystems, and eventually, human cultures and this civilization.

3:54
Two centuries ago [first commercial coal mine that helped grow the local economy was in 1575, England, a positive feedback loop that started the exponential growth of the profitable fossil-fueled era], we tapped the stored energy of ancient sunlight in the form of coal, oil and gas. The oil in a single barrel combined with a machine, can do around five years of human labor for mere pennies, portable, concentrated, incredibly cheap magic.

4:14
This fossil jackpot underpins the phenomenon of the carbon pulse, a one time release of energy stored over geologic time. In under 200 years, we’ve burned what took millions to form. This wasn’t a paycheck, it was a trust fund with which we’ve been throwing a planet wide party.

4:35
When paired with machines, this huge energy surplus did wonders. Population, production and profits all soared, powered by an invisible fossil army, a half a trillion human workers strong. But such power came with blind spots. Our culture confused the tiny cost of fossil energy with its enormous value, and ignored the pollution impacts almost entirely.

5:03
We built a global economy fully dependent on these two [?] hidden [1 energy] subsidies [2 positive feedback drivers of power (joules) and profit (cha-ching)], without acknowledging them, without even seeing them. We remain today energy blind, mistaking financial and technological growth for progress and forgetting what enabled and powered it all [monetary system + fossil fuels, consider On the Ontology of Money].

5:43
The pursuit of energy in nature creates patterns. A single starling follows three simple rules: stay close to your neighbor, but not too close, and move towards the center [separation, alignment, and cohesion]. From these simple animal behaviors, a breathtaking shape, a murmuration appears in the sky — fluid, unpredictable and alive.

6:05
This is emergence in nature. Emergence happens in the human world too. Billions of individuals, businesses and nations, each follow simple cultural rules: seek profit, minimize cost, grow, all tethered to energy, materials and ecosystem impact. The result, global physical patterns no one designed, no one intended, and few are planning around.

7:21
This superorganism isn’t evil. It doesn’t feel, it doesn’t care about equity, ecology or human well being. It just optimizes for throughput, for scale, for more, even when more becomes the problem. There is no mastermind at the wheel, just billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption.

7:44
We’ve inadvertently built [The contingencies of reinforcement (profit/growth/self-interest) built/selected for… no agency/choice implied] a system that rewards material expansion, not wisdom [short-termism, for 75k years, selects for less foresight intelligence], and we’ve outsourced our decision making to markets and algorithms [and technology and ideology as metastatic modernity, as domesticants dependent on technology and ideology]. As a result [of a dynamic, a dissipative system, we do not understand and are captured by], in the past 30 years, we have consumed more energy and materials than all humans before us combined.

8:04
Our current culture feels like it will continue forever [to normal modern humans of NIMH domesticants, Anthropocene enthusiasts], but infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. No energy surplus, no economy. And technology on its own won’t save us because it runs on the same fuel and has the same master.

8:22
The superorganism cannot see what’s coming. It doesn’t anticipate. It only reacts and the signals. It reacts to profits, prices, ignore the deeper, long term risks. So far, our collective response to limits has been to go deeper into ecological and biophysical debt. Buy now, pay later at a planetary scale.

9:25
The cultural story of more is colliding with physical reality. What if more money doesn’t help but just accelerates our transmutation of non renewable wealth into temporary income? The upslope of the carbon pulse, brought growth and complexity.

9:44
On the downslope, the inverse will happen. Less energy, less complexity, less more. A Great Simplification is not a maybe, it’s a when. The economic superorganism is not something humans planned for, nor wanted. It is an emergent phenomenon of large numbers of social primates interacting with large energy surplus without a map.

10:11
Downstream of aggregate behavior as individuals, humans continue to seek the emotional states that served our [mutant expansionist] ancestors, but we now live in a world of scale, speed and stimulation they [pre expansionist homininans] never faced. We’re a [variant of a sub]species far out of context, but we’re not just individuals. We’re deeply social animals. Our values and behaviors adapt to [are determined by genes/memes] our cultural environment, and culture can change [as selected by the contingencies of persistence], sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. It is in our [genetic/cultural/behavioral] wiring to shift once the story shifts too [Our story shifts to serve the contingencies of short-term success/self-interest, e.g. socioeconomic-political narratives].

10:46
Here’s the hopeful twist. The things that truly bring us joy and meaning are not tied to material consumption [love and understanding, which metastatic modernity selects against]. Once our basic human needs are met, what fulfills us is ancient [>75k years ago as a pre-expansionist form of human or renormalized modern human, perhaps possible in as little as 8–20 generations]: connection, purpose, time in nature, being in service. Humans [Normal pre-expansionist K-selected homininans] don’t need endless growth to live rich, meaningful lives.

11:08
So what can we do as this superorganism reaches old age? [Grow poor and die.] Responses fall into four broad categories: policy, biophysical realism, planning for bending not breaking, and the Great Simplification [or double down on what has worked for 75k years until you can’t persist].

11:22
Cultural, news stories, less hubris, more trust and social capital, community, mutual aid, local and regional food and supply chains, ecosystem repair and personal skills, mindset connection, meaning [while meta-reflexively renormalizing enough in 200–500 years to maybe evolve into a viable form of animal].

11:37
We can’t easily [We metastatic moderns cannot] steer or stop the economic superorganism, but we [potentially a small fraction of 1%] can [fore]see what comes next [a condition that forces us to choicelessly change/reversion mutate]. Each of us [who may choicelessly reversion mutate into a viable form of homininan] can be the mitochondria in the cells of a different social organism being born in the not too distant future, in communities, in bioregions, in gatherings across the world [if humans sidestep extinction via reversion mutation, go extinct, or worse, persist as Borg-like expansionists for a longer time].

11:57
It’s already happening [based on zero evidence of reversion mutation, nothing has happened apart from a few isolated individuals unknown to one another who may have ‘waked away from Omelas’]. The stakes have never been higher for humans and for the biosphere [a damaged biosphere will persist — metastatic modernity cannot, which does not exclude the possibility of some humans becoming evolvable animals again instead of forming short-term dissipative structures]. Power scales up, energy, money, control, hierarchy. Life scales deep: interconnection, regeneration, community. The future depends on which of these we feed [on persisting as a viable form of homininan post-reversion mutation].

12:18
This isn’t just a crisis [is a polycrisis with no solution for metastatic modernity, but only outcomes, none viable long term], it is a rite of passage for Homo sapiens. The superorganism we are part of today, is not our destiny as a species, but a fork in a long road. So start the conversation. Build local resilience. Consider being B+ in service of life. Join those shifting the story. Participate in the coming Great Simplification. Thank you. [Walk away from Omelas — which no one can choose to do, away from metastatic modernity, choicelessly via a reversion mutation perhaps caused by love, insight and understanding as mutagen. Underestimating the challenge of renormalizing is lethal. Presuppose that overestimating the challenge of persisting is impossible.]

12:44
Whoops, I went over seven minutes. Quelle surprise, but this is the challenge.

13:33
And that’s part of our problem. Our culture has come to favor short, simple explanations when the reality is nuanced, complex and extremely serious [far more than we know or can know] and a bit distressing and abstract with no easy answers, etc. So I am confident, which is why I’m doing this work, that over time, the truth, which is the systems science, integration of our reality can help us meet the future halfway.

[The modern form of human can only end (sooner being better for life on Earth) —qua moderns, we cannot fix ourselves. “Seek out the condition now that will come anyway.” — H.T. Odum]

“The highest activity a modern human being can attain is to endeavor to understand, because to understand one’s condition is to be delivered from it.” — Baruch Spinoza 1632–1677 CE, one of the most important philosophers — and certainly the most radical — of the early modern period [God=Nature=System]

SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/8/25

After the above was written but before it is scheduled to post (typically a 2–3 week delay), Nate (someone helping him) boiled it down to a 4:00 minute video shared in a Substack note. It is not on YouTube or his main website. I’m guessing it will be. Same content as above, starting 3:34, edited. The coherent story of our predicament contrasts with the later ‘and then what do we do?’ thinking even more starkly. My additions are in brackets and boldface. I put Nate’s words included in the 4 minute (ending about 12:30) version in boldface too.

The 4-minute Version

Most people narrowly believe money powers the world, but it’s really energy.

Two centuries ago, we tapped the stored energy of ancient sunlight in the form of coal, oil and gas. The oil in a single barrel combined with a machine, can do around five years of human labor for mere pennies, portable, concentrated, incredibly cheap magic.

This fossil jackpot underpins the phenomenon of the carbon pulse, a one time release of energy stored over geologic time. In under 200 years, we’ve burned what took millions to form. This huge energy surplus did wonders. Population, production and profits all soared, powered by an invisible fossil army, a half a trillion human workers strong.

We remain today energy blind, mistaking financial and technological growth for progress and forgetting what enabled and powered it all. Billions of individuals, businesses and nations, each follow simple cultural rules: seek profit, minimize cost, grow.

Zoom out far enough, and human civilization itself starts to look and act like a giant organism with its own metabolism. Data flows echo neural signals. Highways and shipping lanes function like veins and arteries with gasoline and diesel as the blood, fractal nodes in a global system each year requiring a higher baseline metabolic requirement.

There is no mastermind at the wheel, just billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption. As a result, in the past 30 years, we have consumed more energy and materials than all humans before us combined.

Our current culture feels like it will continue forever, but infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. No energy surplus, no economy. And technology on its own won’t save us because it runs on the same fuel and has the same master.

So far, our collective response to limits has been to go deeper into ecological and biophysical debt. Buy now, pay later at a planetary scale.

When central banks print money, they are not printing oil, copper or lithium, they’re printing claims on them. We can double the money supply, but the fossil fuels, the forest, the metals, the orangutans, they haven’t changed.

The cultural story of more is colliding with physical reality. The upslope of the carbon pulse, brought growth and complexity. On the downslope, the inverse will happen. Less energy, less complexity, less more. A Great Simplification is not a maybe, it’s a when.

Once our basic human needs are met, what fulfills us is ancient connection, purpose, time in nature, being in service. Humans don’t need endless growth to live rich, meaningful lives.

We can’t easily steer or stop the economic superorganism, but we can see what comes next. Each of us can be the mitochondria in the cells of a different social organism being born in the not too distant future, in communities, in bioregions, in gatherings across the world.

It’s already happening. The stakes have never been higher for humans and for the biosphere.

This isn’t just a crisis, it is a rite of passage for Homo sapiens. The superorganism we are part of today is not our destiny as a species, but a fork in a long road. So start the conversation. Build local resilience. Join those shifting the story. Participate in the coming Great Simplification.

The End

On TikTok, 4 minutes is just way too long. The consumer's attention span is now in the 21 and 34 second range.

So you boil it down to 20 seconds, your message goes viral, all humans with internet access (5.5 billion) see it… and then what? (1% watch the 4 minute version….) Meanwhile, the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed.

Pogo gave us the message we needed to hear in 1970 (below was for Earth Day 1971). It went viral. Meanwhile….

This is not the message from Nate (or any public intellectual or thought leader) in any form.

SUBNOTE TO FILE 6/10/25

Nate alluded to metaphorical mitochondria (some cells have one, human cells range from having 10s to 100s up to 5k in one heart muscle (they are bacterial mutualists of eukaryotes, not organelles of human bodies, and are referred to as ‘powerhouses’ for multiple reasons (adenosine triphosphate anyone?).

11:37
We can’t easily steer or stop the economic superorganism, but we can see what comes next. Each of us can be the mitochondria in the cells of a different social organism being born in the not too distant future, in communities, in bioregions, in gatherings across the world.

So what’s an individual modern human to, as a powerhouse, do? Well, Nate’s Frankly #98 tells us:

Last week we had a video of the superorganism in seven minutes, which was actually the superorganism in like nine and a half minutes [not counting intro and PS]. but near the end of it, I alluded to what comes after the economic Superorganism in the human historical and future trajectory, and I used the word mitochondria of the cells, of what might come next.
The economic superorganism period of human history where cheap fossil energy coupled with abundant global credit and globalization and collaboration is nearing its end in the not too distant future. Some new social organism will replace it. [Or not.]
We don’t know what. Mitochondria are the power centers of biological cells, tiny organelles that convert nutrients into usable energy, keeping the organism and life adaptive and alive in a similar way. The internal human traits and skills offered in this short video and others (I just came up with this, on the fly) could be the mitochondria of a future cultural system for humans.
Each small, distributed, largely invisible, but absolutely essential, they could be the metabolic engines of resilience, regeneration, and a new coherence of how we relate to each other and to the natural world. I wanna explore that a little bit under the, cultural materialism framework of Marvin Harris, who looked at lots of historical cultures and found that they had three things in common. there was a pyramid there.

Today’s world socioeconomic-political system (community size > band size) selects for dissolution. “Seek out the condition now that will come anyway.” [H.T. Odum]

There was the superstructure, which was our ideas and our beliefs and our values on top of the social structure he called the structure, which was our economic system, our laws, our regulations, our institutions, and all that, was on a foundation of infrastructure, which was our energy, our economy, our environment. And he said it was that core foundational infrastructure that was the most important thing. for, cultures changing.
What he didn’t talk about [?] is the inner worlds of the humans alive at the time. I think he kind of subsumed those into the beliefs and values [or didn’t need to — NOMA anyone?]. But if you view this pyramid, in our current 2025, global human predicament. It is highly relevant what the sea of humanity outside this pyramid, expresses, feels, experiences in their own minds. Like how skilled, resilient, able are we as humans to adapt and engage with the coming challenges.
And so I’ve come up with a short list of traits, that speculatively, I don’t know the answers here, the traits that might, comprise the mitochondria of individuals around the world, engaging with the human predicament. so in no particular order here are 10 traits [actually 11] of a different [?] culture. Potentially that engages not only after the superorganism splinters, but while it splinters and before, right now.
So first, which would be, number zero actually is self-care, because before we engage with the world, we have to take care of our physical and mental wellbeing of you, the human being, the person first. That means adequate sleep, nutrition, rest. Exercise, all those things. And this is not self-indulgence. it is the baseline requirement for resilience in a fraying world. regeneration learning creativity arise only when the parasympathetic, nervous system is active. So self-care in these times is not a luxury. It’s actually a neurobiological strategy. and so if we do nothing else, I think. Paying attention to self-care, is critical because only when we sleep well eat decently, move often, and feel safe.

10 Qualities That Could Change the Future

0. Self-care
1. Grounding
2. Post-Tragic Mindset
3. Networked
4. Co-Regulation
5. Systems Thinking or Wide Boundary Thinking
6. Restraint
7. Status-Free or Status Aware
8. Interconnected
9. Emergence
10. Play & Joy

Read about 1–10 here. Or not.

The Superorganism Explained in 7 Minutes