The Centralized Mind

Why do we centralize? A centralized body wants straight lines. At a high level, this is the source of all problems.

Our tendency to dissect, analyze, and categorize … what some would call left-hemisphere dominance … this played well with the grain. Rice, wheat, barley, millet. The grain is calorie-dense, portable, storable. But most importantly, it has a synchronized harvest, thus it’s countable and trackable, and it’s capable of enabling centralized state formation and taxation. Call it a grain-state.

And the grain-state wants legibility, that is, something to write down and track, measure, predict, and optimize. This is largely why the futures markets exist, with crops like wheat and rice that people are forced to produce in a monoculture fashion or go out of business. The state is not designed to handle an integrated, often unpredictable output. It is not designed to handle Nature.

What we call “agriculture” is really about making land legible to markets. You flatten a forest, kill the soil, plant one thing in rows, spray it to keep everything else out, and harvest it in bulk so it can be priced, traded, and shipped as a commodity. You have to force it every single season.

Think about how destructive this is, organic or not. You uproot a forest created by nature into a plain, then run a machine over it to flip and expose bare soil to the elements because that’s the way it’s “always been done,” and add fertilizer because you’ve severed the fungal and other vital biodiverse connections. None of this is good. This practice is what we decided to call “farming,” and we believe this is just another part of life. Homes here, flat land there, and commercial buildings over there. This is what we accept.

Organic farming is hardly different. It’s still input-based. It’s adding to a system that is already fragmented. The fertilizers and things may not be synthetic, but the greater environment and conditions … whether nature is being worked with or against … these are the real drivers. 

Calling something “organic” is a reaction to the input-based, chemical-focused culture that we have, that isolates, demonizes, or glorifies particles and components instead of seeing things whole.

Organic doesn’t tell you whether the system itself was alive, whether fertility was created internally through root symbiosis and nutrient cycling. When the status quo is one of inputs and limitations, the solutions too can only be limited.

Maximizing fruit/crop yield at all costs puts both us and the planet in a state of emergency, and the consequence of this is that business, regardless of industry, functions like a headless chicken, looking for fires to put out while creating new ones. It’s regardless of industry because it’s the approach that is pervasive. The approach of metric-driven measurement-obsessed optimization.

We never needed debt, never needed to create credit, for the same reason we never needed the kind of futures market for crops that we force farmers to maximize yields of. Rapid population growth selected for the metric-happy half of the human brain … the half that designed modern society.

This population growth curve is unprecedented across all species. Only happened to humans. Agriculture fed more people but ate through its own soil in the process. Not quite self-feeding, more like self-eating.

Now, where does this come from? You might say it originated in the West during the Enlightenment and then accelerated after the Industrial Revolution, and that now it’s global. But I think it goes way back. Duality in thought, since the beginning; the tendency to not see the oneness in all things. The separation of body and mind being the most poignant. Plato, for instance.

In the Phaedo, Plato frames the body as a temporary vessel for an eternal soul. To me, this implies that the body and soul are separate things, and that soul is something that can be contained the way you can contain a butterfly in a jar. In my observations, soul, or whatever we want to call it, the animating quality, the aliveness, isn’t located “somewhere else”. It’s in the grain of the wood, in the way water moves, in the body itself. The body doesn’t contain soul … the body is ensouled. It’s in everything. The water carving rock, the dead leaf feeding the forest floor. The whole system is ensouled. The most telltale clue of this is that every cell in our body contains DNA. Soul is intangible, beyond DNA, but the point remains. DNA is not located in some central place; it’s embedded all through the organism.

Despite this, we centralize. We place all intelligence in the brain. Our governance is the opposite of distributed. We keep recreating the same model of a command center that runs everything below it. Thus what we build is fragile, because centralized systems are fragile; they’re unintegrated.

But see Nature. Cut a planarian worm in half and both halves regenerate. A forest loses a massive tree and the network redistributes resources to the remaining trees. Every part carries the whole in some sense. An integrated system.

The combination of scale, fear, and the desire for straight lines … this is what gives rise to the centralized mind, the mind responsible for every single thing that just doesn’t feel quite right in modern life.

For a long time this went unnoticed; we carried on with our lives, gave our business to mega corporations, trusted bureaucrats, believed in our institutions. But if you’re seeing the things I’m seeing … you know the jig’s about to be up in supernova fashion. If I’m sure about one thing, it’s that these coming years will unlike anything else we’ve ever witnessed. The innate human desire to live in harmony with nature … this can never be destroyed; it can only be suppressed. And the longer the suppression, the wilder the recoil.