Before we delve into the main topic of this discourse, take a moment to reflect on the human brain. Our brains are capable of such incredible feats that they may ultimately craft their own evolutionary successor (see On Progress, Progress) and render itself extinct– actually, let us digress from this digression.
The very idea that are knowingly and deliberately attempting to create their own evolutionary successor (via some form of artificial intelligence) is fascinating. It is a slap in Darwin’s face, in that it would not be an evolutionary progression brought about by natural forces, but rather it will be brought about by information itself, having become so advanced and organized that it no longer relies on external pressures to shape its evolutionary path arbitrarily; it now dictates its own path, to the detriment of its current . It’s essentially reverse entropy.
But that’s all assuming our species won’t destroy itself before that transcendence occurs, which we most certainly will; and in that case, our self-destruction would be natural pressure terminating this strain of evolution because it became too unstable and unsustainable.
Anyway.
Our brains are incredible devices, capable of conceptualizing infinities in all directions and measuring tangible and intangible things on scales from trillions down to trillionths. Our scientists and mathematicians deal with these numbers every day.
The problem is, our brains are in no way designed to handle anything remotely close to these scales. Without mathematical training, primitive tribes exhibit some variation of the “one, two, many” model of quantification. And research suggests that even in modern societies with general mathematical knowledge, we do not naturally create a linear number line but rather a logarithmic one. In simple terms, we implicitly assume that 1000 is closer to 2000 than it is to 1.
We are, at best, able to grasp numbers on the scale that we deal with regularly. So if a worker makes fifty thousand dollars a year, their entire numerical framework is scaled according to that, and that is generally the biggest number they encounter in any meaningful way. A million and a billion both seem equally far off from their scale, even though they are one thousand times closer to a million than to a billion. Frankly, even the idea of being a thousand times closer or farther from something means very little without serious thought.
The point of all this is not to discuss how people are fundamentally ill-equipped to understand just how obscene the billionaire class’ greed . The point is to discuss the scale of human population and how it affects (and generally impinges) social constructs.
The current global population is about 7.8 billion people. In 1972, it was 3.9 billion. We doubled the population by adding four billion people in just 50 years.
What do you do with people? How do you provide them with the patently-unsustainable standard of living that the Global North promises to billions that are sucking down coal fumes and pouring toxic sludge into rivers?
How do you acheive any sort of consensus across such a vast population, especially as you extol the virtue of liberal self-expression and nonconformity? How do you control the disinformation and weaponization of ignorance that seems to only be accelerating? How do you foster unity across vastly disparate religious and ideological views and mitigate the instinctual hatred of the “other”?
These questions require immediate answers even at a drastically smaller scale such as the United States, which has just 5% of the global population. Five percent! But that’s still 400 million people. 400 million people with varying beliefs and values and goals and morals and ethics, all stuck in a spiral of radicalization and tribalization, consuming as much as they possibly can because they have been indoctrinated into a consumer capitalist culture that discourages critical thinking or conscious living.
The Savior Self believes that we are at the of a civilization or, in fact, we are actually far past that limit but it has happened so quickly that we are now seeing the cascading consequences.
This is not specifically an issue of population, although the exponential growth we have seen since the Industrial Revolution is very definitely not sustainable for much longer no matter how society is structured, unless we somehow manage to become an interplanetary species, which is highly unlikely no matter what the sad little billionaires tell you.
This is an issue of globalization, liberalism, and information superhighways, all acting upon a massive population of people that are fundamentally .
We have been biologically frozen in time for 100,00 years; the fundamental machinery of Homo sapiens sapiens still operates on neural hardware adapted to hunter-gatherer tribes of a couple dozen at most. The rules were few, might made right, and if you didn’t agree with the prevailing mythological fairytale you were left outside for the wolves.
Everything that has come after that point is… fragile, to say the least. Throughout most of history, civilization has largely stuck to that same playbook, even as tribes expanded into empires. Only in the past century has the concept of cosmopolitanism gained traction (see On Tolerance); different peoples living in cities of millions and entertaining concern for the tragedies of billions of strangers across the globe are manageable when we have the luxury of stability.
But in times of pressure, we all find ourselves instinctively reverting back to our primitive firmware, the one that rabidly clings to mystical fairy tales, assembles in small tribes to fend off invading “others”, and goes into survival mode.
And now, in a state of constant pressure from the demands of modern society, political instability, and impending ecological collapse, we seek safety in the charlatans and the strongmen, who exploit our fears and our dumbness for their own gain with no regard for the consequences. Of course, this has always been the case, but the impact is now global and cascading, where previously it was confined to a single region or nation-state at most.
Eight billion people is a lot, but it’s a fraction of a percent of the biomass of this planet. Even with our calorie-hungry brains and our idea-hungry minds, we could readily support ten or twenty billion people on this planet (or more!), were we to organize society with more manageable structures and curb our insatiable appetites for novelties and so-called progress. We could use our intellectual evolution to foster peace and prosperity, to ensure that all people live comfortable, fulfilling lives free of tyranny, and to protect what remains of the planet and reduce our further harm.
But the Savior Self maintains that this is no longer a realistic goal, given the very issues of scale that we are discussing. Many great thinkers and dreamers have presented visions of such futures, but no one has ever devised a realistic path to those visions that did not necessitate large-scale death and suffering. Because there is no conceivable way to calmly convince a critical mass of people (or their corrupt leaders) to abandon the flawed belief systems that provide them and attempt to build a utopia that defies every indoctrinated notion they have about the world.
Although the Church rejects accelerationism, the Savior Self concedes that the only possible path forward requires traversing the incipient collapse, because the overwhelming majority of people will tolerate misery as long as it provides stability. Our only hope is that we may forge something better out of the ashes once that final stability is gone.
