25 August 2021: Introducing Advancing Humanity, a weekly running paper under Future Humanity that will cover everything relating to challenges our civilization faces today and how to address those challenges. This week will examine the true nature of human society and why decentralization is the key to moving the whole of humanity forward.
An Introduction Into a New School of Thought
Many topics and points discussed below are all worthy of their own paper of which future installments of this weekly paper will cover in proper detail. For the purposes of this initial paper, an introduction to this school of thought is sufficient. To understand the profound importance of decentralization, one must first understand why past and current systems of societal governance have failed. This failure stems from a failure to understand how the root of reality truly operates.
Through a general understanding of human history, there emerges from the records two constants that ring true to every human civilization to date: centralization has always been at the center of organization, and every single civilization to date has eventually collapsed. Thus, a correlation can be drawn. While the reasons for systemic collapse differ from civilization to civilization, the overarching constant of the inevitable collapse over time remains true. Two conclusions can be drawn from this premise.
The first of these is simply that aspects of reality change over time; whether it be new information that arose and led to the destruction of previous patterns of thought or the study of black swan theory showing, through statistical analysis, that outlier events become increasingly more probable over time. No matter the circumstances, a centralization of governing power will never be able to full encompass the dynamic nature of all variables of the universe in a manner that could ever guarantee longevity. Changes over time are inevitable and pose challenges to the continuity of human civilizations.
The other conclusion that can be drawn is everything and everyone is connected. A persistent error within the sciences is that closed systems, typically ideal for experimentation, actually have no true base within reality. The universe is an open system and everything within it is a separate variable that must be accounted for to ensure true accuracy. Obviously, with an infinite amount of variables to consider, we can never be 100% sure of the true reason for any outcome. This rings especially true to human societies. Human beings are like separate nodes running on the same conscious network. Every single individual has a unique perspective of the world and how it works, and each individual also influences that network through the feedback loop they create. This point will be explored in detail in the next section.
Power of Individual Human Influence
Consider the following example. By changing just one person's mind, an individual can indirectly change thousands, including themselves. How? Take a look at the Figure 1 below.
This feedback loop starts with the orange figure in the very middle. That individual shares an idea with their inner network of peers. From there, the idea is shared further by a few individuals who go to share the idea within their network, and so on. Over time, the original idea is transformed through each leg of the process having been influenced by each individual mind it comes across. Eventually, that original idea will cycle its way back through the system to the original individual in a continuous, complex feedback loop.
Therefore, one individual's idea has now influenced thousands, including themselves as the idea is transformed by other individuals. Additionally, each individual person in the figure above has their own feedback loop with the rest of the world. Seem complicated? That is because it is. It is next to impossible to account for all the distinct variables of each individual contributing to the whole. Human consciousness, in its entirety, can be thought of as one massive individual conscious network in which each and every individual contributes to the whole as a unique point of perspective. The result of this connected network is simple: human society.
By influencing just a single person, each individual can effectively change the world around them. This also works in the opposite direction. Every single variable within reality is also influencing you, the individual. The energy one gives off, the books that are written, the ideas that are shared - all of these things have massive influence on other individuals because of the connection between everyone. This feedback loop exists between all things and human beings are no exception. It can be considered as a fundamental law of the universe.
When considering this fact, three things become clear. The first is that everything truly is connected. The second is that each individual person is equally important to the whole. The final point is that society is a projection of the whole of individual consciousness of which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is true with human civilization. If, when staring into the fabric of society, we do not like what we see staring back, the first reaction is to change society. However, this is foolhardy as it can be immensely difficult. Changing society from the outside is like trying to melt steel with a match. The most appropriate and effective way to enact societal change is to initiate that change from within. Why? Because each individual is connected to the whole, and the whole consists of everything and everyone. Therefore, the individual has much greater influence over the whole from within themselves.
To summarize this information, we can draw three distinct conclusions.
1. Everything is connected, including each and every individual human being
2. Society is the projection of individual human consciousness engaging in a continuous feedback loop with the whole
3. Civilizations collapse due to a failure to recognize the above two conclusions
Thus, when considering these three points, the shortcomings of centralization become abundantly clear. No concentration of power could ever effectively manage and govern an infinite amount of variables with any hope for accuracy or success. This is why every single civilization to date has eventually failed. The Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Romans - the list goes on and on and on. Modern civilization is absolutely no exception.
Rise of Decentralization & Cryptocurrencies
This leads us to the rise of the decentralization movement. Currently, humanity is plagued with multiple threats, the biggest one being the existential threat of rapidly worsening global climate change. This threat will result in nothing short of the mass extinction of the biosphere, the rapid warming of the planet beyond adaptation abilities of human civilization, and ever-worsening unpredictability in the planet's climate. Centralized bodies of power have yet to address this massive challenge. This is because they do not know how or to what extent they should. No one likes change because change is hard, especially when a small fraction of the whole system is trying to make the decisions for the whole itself. Centralization, while generally deemed as more efficient, is anything but.
Decentralization, sustainability, and the ability to remain dynamic is the best possible way forward for a more stable, secure human civilization. The question is how we get there. Well, whether the cryptocurrency movement recognizes it or not, an answer is developing from the very code being written today. Satoshi Nakamoto, though a mysterious figure, gave the world something it can never truly repay him for: a way to govern ourselves as individuals. This self-governance has come in the form of an alternative to traditional financial systems as a trustless, decentralized network. This network is the most famous cryptocurrency - Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Represents More Than Money
The centralization of monetary control will never benefit the whole as the small group of individuals running the system will never have the information suitable to incorporate all of the infinite variables of such a system. It is also through this centralization of monetary power that keeps the chokehold of complete governing power of the peoples of Earth. Bitcoin offers a significant improvement upon this system. In a broad sense, whether the governance protocol be proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, or something entirely different, the fundamental basis of the system remains the same - decentralization over centralization. The more variables you acknowledge through inclusion in the system, the more information, perspective, and insight that is also included in the system.
Better still, since no one inherently controls the Bitcoin network, there is no seduction of power presented with the network. Thus, if the ability to gain power within the system does not exist, there will be no pursuit of power at all. The obvious rebuttal to this statement is the possibility of 51% attacks, FUD, governmental intervention, and so on. However, these attempts have not diminished the resiliency of the Bitcoin network at all. So, if the attacks and alternatives to bring down or control the system all fail, they will fade away. Instead, a shift towards adoption and acceptance is much more likely to occur over the long term.
While this is not an endorsement of the Bitcoin maximalist movement, Bitcoin does provide an absolutely beautiful example of how a decentralized system can traverse the shortcomings of centralized power simply by how it is designed. The philosophy behind Bitcoin is a glowing example of how we should restructure all aspects of human civilization to be decentralized, inclusive, and sustainable. Through a takeover of monetary power through the utilization of decentralized financial protocols, humanity can choose to acknowledge our connected nature and take back governance of ourselves, free from centralized authority.
Those not knowledgeable on the past are doomed to repeat it. Additionally, madness is generally defined as repeating the same action over and over again while expecting different results. This logic can be directly applied to human civilizations up to this point in our history. All have been built on a disconnected world view, all have included the centralization of power, and all have collapsed. Today's civilization will be no exception. Thus, that brings us to the biggest question.
What do we want to come next - more of the same, or something entirely knew?
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