This Notion of Control
“And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea and all that it inherit, shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little lives are rounded in sleep”
The wise know well not to put too much stock in human enterprise…. especially so when it comes to the enterprise of ‘empire’ building. Every empire that man has created has eventually collapsed, each a victim of its own excess. And the current model is no exception… the only remarkable feature that distinguishes this collapse from those that preceded it is the sheer magnitude of the excess (and corruption). History keeps on repeating itself over and over again and yet the aggressive hyper-humans just don’t seem to get it. Build, collapse…build, collapse… build, collapse. Is history trying to tell us something?? This penchant for systemic collapse was written into the DNA of western civilization, right from the get-go. That very precise and seminal moment occurred some ten thousand years ago when our super-sized brains first came up with the poisonous ‘idea’ that we – as a singular species group – could begin to take over control of nature (i.e., the capture, confinement and mass-breeding of wild plants and animal species). It was this seemingly benign and yet highly lethal act of taking control that upset nature’s delicate balancing act and marked the beginning of the end for the hyper-humans and quite possibly the rest of the biosphere as well.
Unprecedented, in the entire three-and-a-half billion-year history of biological evolution… this notion of control.