Essay: Planes and Cycles
We were never at any lofty height, if we are to suppose for a minute that reaching great heights is somehow an apt metaphor for success. Since, arguably, the industrial revolution, though perhaps the agricultural, we had been on a perilously steep climb, hoping to make it into the clouds. Building the plane as we flew, it continued to grow more and more complex. Soon, we reached the point where it became so inexplicably contrived that we no longer understood it. We clung on to the runaway machine, having quickly lost the faintest of ideas of how it worked.
Now here we are, desperately clutching at the shiny metal material, our lives depending on systems so incomprehensible that we do not know how to turn them off, or even if we can. Perhaps a better adage would somehow equate achievement with connection to the ground. At least then if we had to break the machine apart, we would at least be in the dirt, as good a place as any to start something.
How does a seed know to be a plant? For all living things, the currently accepted understanding is that within each entity are primal instructions on how to, in totality, be. It is in their DNA. Biologically encoded, as they say. This iniquitous comparison of life to the digital and machine, creates an idiom that belies the very grandeur of the question. It is wielded as a precept, regulating and pushing back against independent thought about the secrets of life, with a response brimming with implied complexity that puts one back in their place. That place being in the artificial glow of the machine.
There is, though, some majesty to be found in the words that deliberately conceal by confusion. Looking through scientific language reduced to an initialised abbreviation, like most things that are desired to be taken at face value, the understanding that complexity unfolds from the seed, responding to its surroundings, omniscient - but only about what is truly important, is delivered.
Human systems may once have existed this way, benefited by some knowledge of what was really important to life, which is to say all life, not just the anthropocentric systems we have continued to build over the generations. It would have been unfair, surely not the place of the next generation, to question where the instructions were. Maybe some did, but the possible answers they received could only make things worse, their predecessors either admitting they did not understand how the systems that governed their existence worked, or that there was no manual in the first place, just a tangled mess of self-serving systems without though of repercussions down the line. Perhaps a few knew enough to at least see where the machine was heading, but kept that knowledge to themselves.
At this point, western society (and the rest of the world whom suffer the consequences of its behaviour) finds itself in somewhat of a nosedive, towards a lifeless ground of depleted soils below us, but most of the passengers are too caught up in the distracting work of feeding the machine, and themselves, to take notice.
The fundamental tenets of life lie the cycle of birth, growth, death, and decay. If living systems indeed possess the aforementioned collective DNA encoding of their ecology, then somewhere along the line we as a society have gone off script, our anthropocentric systems artificially pursuing only a fraction of what it means to be alive - namely growth. ‘Too big to fail’ systems cannot die, because that would be to admit that they are alive - and to undo the deceit we have told ourselves for so long.
The widely held sentiment is that we can invent our way out of the problems of modernity. The reality we inhabit has been reduced to a scenario of numbers, predicted outcomes based on regulations and restrictions, and the anticipated technology that we believe will save us. This has to be believed, because for many there is nothing left to believe in, all cast aside in the name of science and technology, progress, or not cognisant of any other way to begin with. Undeniably, progress has brought great comfort, but could this have been achieved in principle with the great universal cycle? Could we have had growth, but paid attention to the organic checks and balances that were there all along?
As we try to pull up, building new parts on to the plane will not be the ultimate solution. Others would find some extra runway, with a promise to pay for it later, and indeed they would. Perhaps the sense of peril we are feeling is the acknowledgement that our systems were once alive, and those earliest of elements lay deep within. Like all living things, it will be that our elements return to the earth, so that other life may be born, in the great exchange of death and decay.
