It’s effectively untrue that humans are organisms similar to other organisms in a variety of important senses. Frankly, it appears that our species was either ‘helped’ or ‘interfered with’ or both by advanced nonhuman intellligences throughout our evolution. It also appears that whatever they were originally up to went badly sideways, at least around here.

We do not really live ‘in the environment’ in the ways other organisms do. Or at least, for about the past 500 years, we haven’t. What we ‘live in’ is, physically, the environment, but our minds create a vast array of representational overlays, most of which are, frankly, insane.

So we live, the broad mass of us, in a layered array of structured conceptual, linguistic and cultural fictions. At the scale of our species, nearly zero attention is paid to the environment, except, perhaps, how to control, obliterate, or commodify it.

There is no other organism on Earth that could possibly »afford to do this and also survive. We survive by offloading the results of our insanity into the remaining anciently conserved ecologies.

What analogy could possibly capture how absurd this is? It resembles a machine-empowered embryo that offloads its tyrannical urges into the womb in which it is presently developing, and doubles down on this process whenever there is any feedback from the mother’s body. Imagine someone who runs directly, full force at a brick wall, but simply becomes more determined to repeat this activity, with nearly total unwillingness to acknowledge the solid surface or the damage they take with each run. That’s us. As a species. Right now.

So whatever actual organisms »might be and be doing, and those organisms are, in fact, the womb in which our species is developing, there’s »nothing stopping the worst common denominator of homo sapiens from wiping that out. In fact, there are myriads of structured fictions we enact that simply demand we do this faster and more effectively, moment-to-moment. And that this process continues to accelerate.

We have failed to develop anything resembling an intelligent or peaceful society. But it’s not because we are inherently stupid, or omnicidal. Rather it is because we are vulnerable, at the group-level of our social aspects, to capture … by what?

Structured fictions of function, value, identity… and imaginary ‘mastery’ of Nature. We are completely blinded by »representations, and we prefer them to Life. It’s this last part that is the most lethal. An embryo in a living planet-womb that attacks the womb… must be destroyed by the body.

But our story is not yet over. There is, at least, hope… that we may learn to establish intelligent, peaceful human cultures. How that will occur remains for us, and whatever may assist us… to determine…together. With and for each other. And the history and future of Life on Earth.