.png)
3 months ago
2
When a house burns, it is in a decay mode. As it is when it is abandoned. The large systems in which houses are embedded try to prevent and resist such decay modes, but even so such modes still happen at times.
When our bodies get sick they are in decay modes, modes we try to prevent and resist. But even when not sick, our bodies are mostly in a slow overall decay mode of aging. As are typically our houses, cars, and organizations.
Science and business seem to be improving, not decaying, even as individual scientists and business firms decay. But in history whole empires not only fell into fast temporary decay modes like famines and pandemics, they also typically entered slow decay modes, and went away. You might hope that empires just rose more slowly than rivals, and so were displaced, but its seems that, no, empires mostly decayed from within.
Firms decay even though they have internal processes of innovation and improvement, and entire biological species have also decayed, even though they have internal innovation driven by natural selection.
Mars and Venus may have once harbored life, which was destroyed when those whole planets drifted into decay modes. Planetary decay modes may be a big part of the great filter that explains why there are so few planets with life as advanced as ours.
Humanity has pioneered a new form of natural selection on Earth: cultural evolution. This has powered our rapid and large rise, unprecedented compared to other animals. But even natural selection as a system is capable of falling into decay modes.
Which we seem to have done over the last few centuries. Powerful success at innovating tech and business practices has led to wealth and much easier talk, trade, and travel, which has greatly weakened cultural evolution at the macro culture level.
We now have far weaker selection pressures are, and far faster change in the adaptive target which evolution needs to track. What were once hundreds of thousands of peasant cultures have merged into a monoculture encompassing most of the world. Furthermore, we have drifted into a mode where we celebrate the cultural activists who cause rapid culture change largely random relative to adaptive pressures.
Thankfully a few subcultures, like the Amish and Haredim, seem likely to resist being merged into our monoculture, so they can save humanity from extinction. But there will be great hell to pay before that recovery.
Decay modes are quite common in all types of systems. Natural selection tends to evolve systems that try to resist internal decay modes. But our most basic systems of natural selection are themselves systems that can fall into decay modes. From which maybe only luck can save us.
