Humans have succumbed to a life-threatening tendency to believe we are at the center of the universe. A point first conveyed by two-thousand-year-old religions putting humans at the center of the interests of about one hundred manmade gods, outright discarding the needs of or interest in other animals. With the prophecy of popes, priests, pastors, and reverends cunningly proclaiming supremacy over greater-fool disciples, desperately holding on to frozen commandments from a time we did not know much about the world or the universe.
This is the crazy world we live in: all the advances and understanding are used only to continue the nonsense which has existed for 2,000 years.
— RICHARD FEYNMAN (1918-1988)
In more modern times, we, as arguably the most intelligent species on earth, continue such mind-numbing solipsism with more modern manmade religions equally spreading like wildfire across the globe. We invented economic religions, this time perpetrated by self-anointed human gods. The experts of economic dogmas assume the sum of human wants to be solidified by the adoration of a democracy, for example, fundamentally improving human needs. Another foolish presumption, considering the needs of humanity is subject to the rule of nature, not the rule of man.
Today, as defined by the arbitrage of our policy, capital, and innovation practices, human gameplay is fundamentally incompatible with nature’s gameplay, causing the fractal of human ingenuity to expand in a different direction than nature requires. Amidst much applause to self-aggrandizing human advancement ignorant to nature’s truth, we blissfully devolve into an anthropogenic cascade compounding the opportunity cost and time needed to course-correct.
The only truth to which humans, along with other species, are beholden is nature’s truth. A fact that demotes humanity’s importance to merely one of the players of a collaborative game of coexistence we do not define or govern. The excellence and longevity of humanity are —in reality— determined by how well we understand and adhere to nature’s gameplay. By the constructs designed to manage itself, nature’s gameplay humanity has yet to implement.
As I discovered, changing human gameplay is remarkably easy to implement. It requires a simple yet impactful change of the compass of monetary incentives we attach to the systems we deploy to manage ourselves. However, such change requires real leadership, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed enough to recognize human adaptability to nature’s entropy — not consensus around manmade conjecture— is the only thing that fundamentally improves the human species’ excellence and longevity.
We exist at the mercy of nature. To think different is to think natural.
