The centralized mind

Why do we have this constant impulse to centralize? It's for the same reason we love to dissect and categorize. It's the brain doing what the brain does. But the systems we've built, the societies we run, and the institutions we are beholden to ... they are all telltale signs that brain games of this sort ... have run amok.

One of the most vivid examples involves the humble grain. The connection may not be obvious at first, but once seen, it will all snap into place.

Headless chickens

The grain is calorie-dense, portable, and storable. But most importantly, it has a synchronized harvest. Thus, it is countable and trackable, and it is capable of enabling centralized state formation and taxation.

I will call it a grain state.

The grain-state wants legibility—that is—something to write down and track, forecast, and optimize. It then occurred to me that that is largely why the futures market exists; the collective loves predictability.

Well then, what is the effect of this? The effect is that people are forced to produce certain crops ... in a monoculture fashion .... or go out of business. The grain state is not designed to handle an integrated, often unpredictable and dynamic output. It is not designed to handle Nature.

When a world can recognize only certain kinds of value, people reshape what they can ... to make that value visible. This is how a preference inside the mind ... becomes a force acting on the land.

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.

It took me a while to learn how destructive this is ... "organic" or not.

We uproot a forest created by nature into a plain. Then we 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 because the fungal and other vital biodiverse connections have now been severed, we use fertilizers. 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've come to accept.

I think organic farming is hardly different. 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 that we now routinely miss.

Calling something “organic” is a reaction to the input-based, chemical-focused culture that we have ... a culture that isolates, demonizes, or glorifies components instead of seeing things Whole. Organic doesn’t tell me whether the system itself was Alive, whether fertility was created internally ... through root symbiosis and nutrient cycling.

The whole apparatus, as you can see, is structurally flawed.

Maximizing crop yield at all costs puts both humans and the planet in a state of emergency. Consequently ... 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 optimization is one that is at odds with anything Genuine.

To be ensouled

I have an idea called the Cove City. Such a place—due to its permaculture-minded, holistic way of operating—does not need, among other things, to force farmers to maximize yields of select crops.

But there is something to be said about our rapid population growth. My working theory is as follows: large societies reward certain habits of thought ... habits that are allergic to truth and the dynamism of life. The Anticove is, among other things, a product of sheer mass; quantity over quality.

What can I say? Agriculture fed more people ... but it—literally—ate through its own soil in the process.

But agriculture is just a symptom .. a symptom of a sort of intangible pathology of the collective human mind ... and I think it goes way back. Duality in thought, since the beginning. The separation of body and mind being the most poignant.

In the Phaedo, Plato frames the body as a temporary vessel for an eternal soul. To me, his writing 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.

But 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 natural order is ensouled.

Despite this, we centralize. We keep creating the same model of a command centre that runs everything below it. To me ... this is striking evidence that we place the brain at the highest level of importance ... but specifically the parts that intellectualize, plan, delegate, analyze, and rationalize. These ... I see ... are the crown jewels of virtually every society today. Societies that remain firmly closed to the alchemy of life.

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

But I think the innate Human desire is to live in clarity and freedom ... and in some way, shape, or form .. live integrated with nature. This desire can never be destroyed; it can only be suppressed. And the longer the suppression, the wilder the recoil.