An Invincible Prairie

Phase 1: Embedded Complexity

Humans have been around for about 300,000 years. For almost all of that, we lived in small groups – maybe 20 to 150 people. No bosses, no kings, no landlords.

Not because people were naturally nice, but because the group actively stopped anyone from taking control. If someone got too big for themselves, they got mocked, shunned, or worse. Anthropologists call this "reverse dominance hierarchy" – the group collectively dominates would-be dominators.

Here's the thing: nature is complex. Living in it, as part of it, required complexity. People who noticed patterns others missed. People who couldn't stop asking questions. People who didn't just go along with things. People who had spiky profiles – really good at some things, really bad at others. People who picked up the smallest sounds, saw the minute details in the tracks, catalogued the changing of the seasons.

That was fine. Actually, it was essential. The environment itself was spiky. It was weird, unpredictable, and had a billion moving pieces interacting chaotically. This is where we thrived, because we don't get intimidated by complexity; we are drawn to it. We are compelled to break it down, to understand it, to inhabit it.

There was no pressure to be a generalist, interchangeable unit. You could just be what you were, and the group was all the better for it.

People like us – neurodivergent people – we had roles. Very important roles: the keepers, the braiders, the hunters, the tellers of complexity. We belonged.

Phase 2: Compression

Then, around 10,000 years ago, something changed. Some groups started farming grain and staying in one place.

Grain can be stored. Counted. Taxed.

Suddenly you could accumulate surplus. And whoever controlled the surplus had power. For the first time, that power could outlast a single person. It could become a system. And loyalty to the system was bought.

This is where the extraction-protection racket emerges. A class of people who extract surplus from the producers, and "protect" them in exchange (often from threats the extractors themselves create). It's the basic engine of what we call civilization.

But here's what this required: legibility. Control. Interchangeable units.

You can't run a grain empire on a thousand different human shapes. You need peasants who farm, soldiers who fight, priests who legitimize. You need people to fit roles. The roles come first; the people get compressed into them.

Complexity became a threat. Flatten it. Enforce normal. Anyone who didn't fit the mold wasn't just inconvenient – they were dangerous to the system. Shamans became witches. Questioners became heretics. Difference got pathologized, exiled, or eliminated.

This is when neurodivergent people stopped belonging.

Phase 3: Contorted Re-complexification

Fast forward a few thousand years. The extraction-protection racket kept evolving. Empires rose and fell. Feudalism. Colonialism. Capitalism. Democracy.

And somewhere along the way, the machine got sophisticated.

It discovered something: it could extract more value by allowing some complexity back in. Not because it learned to value difference. Because specialized workers produce more than interchangeable ones. Knowledge economies need pattern-seers. Innovation requires people who don't just follow the script. To extract even more complex things from nature, you need someone who understands nature intimately.

So complexity returned – but contorted. Twisted into a shape that serves the accumulation loop.

Now some spikes get rewarded. If your particular brand of neurodivergence makes you a good programmer, analyst, artist, forester, or systems thinker – welcome back! Conditionally. You're valued when your difference produces value.

But you're still pathologized when your difference has needs. The celebration of neurodiversity and the expectation to mask aren't contradictory. They're the same system saying: give us the good parts, hide the rest.

This is where we are now.

It's genuinely better than Phase 2. I can live in a big and diverse metropolis, pursue work that fits my brain, find other people like me. I'm not conscripted into a grain field or burned as a witch. That's real improvement.

But it's instrumental improvement. We got accidentally reintegrated – not because the system learned to see us as full humans, but because its complexity happened to create niches that fit some of our shapes. It's exploitation that sometimes feels like belonging.

And here's the catch: this whole system still revolves around a single attractor. Accumulation. Growth. The pie must always get bigger.

The thing is, you don't need a villain twirling a mustache anymore. You just need people following procedures. Normal people doing normal jobs can produce horrific outcomes – and nobody feels responsible because everyone was just following the rules.

That's what changed. Domination became infrastructure. And everyone has a vested interest in keeping it running, because when the pie grows as a whole, so does their tiny piece of it.

Phase 4: Collapse

The machine is hitting limits.

This is Joseph Tainter's point: complexity is a problem-solving strategy, but it has diminishing returns and escalating maintenance costs. Eventually, the society can't maintain the complexity it's built. It simplifies – sometimes gradually, sometimes catastrophically.

Our particular machine runs on fossil fuels and infinite growth, and both are running out. Ecological overshoot. Systems too interconnected to manage. Problems generating faster than solutions. Eventually, it exceeds even us complexity-speakers' combined capacity to troubleshoot.

I don't know exactly what happens next. But the thing that's been running for a few thousand years is hitting walls it can't grow past.

This isn't hope. Collapse is brutal. The people who dominate now will try to dominate the ruins too. It's just... what's happening.

So What Do We Do?

Honestly? We do what humans have always done.

We find each other. We take care of each other in real, small ways. We see the systems clearly so they can't trick us. We grieve what's ending, because it deserves grief. And we love anyway – not because it wins, but because that's what people like us have always done.

Our brains that don't fit the machine? They might be what helps us see it coming. The same traits that got us accidentally reintegrated into Phase 3 – pattern recognition, not swallowing the script, modeling systems – might be exactly what's useful for navigating Phase 4.

We've been practicing "the normal thing isn't working, what's the alternative?" our whole lives.

That's the whole thing. We're not broken. We just got born at a weird inflection point – late enough in the cycle to be conditionally valued, early enough to watch it unravel.

Our job is to remember how to be human while it falls apart.

And maybe, in the cracks, to remember what embedded, natural complexity felt like. Small groups. Mutual aid. Roles that fit people instead of people compressed into roles.

Not because we'll rebuild paradise. But because it's the only thing that ever actually worked.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if any of this makes sense.

For as long as humans have thought, we have consistently "re-derived" theorems about our universe. The fact that ancient hunter-gatherer societies developed religions leads me to believe that humans have always grappled with the fundamental problem of existence.

As I was brought up in the modern Western scientific traditions, that is the path through which I re-derived my own response to the problem.

It follows from Gödel, Tarski, and the second-order cyberneticists that an observer embedded in a closed system is unable to define, let alone derive, truths about that system. Therefore, it follows that "meaning" – the reason for existence – is inaccessible to the human mind.

I maintain, however, that the scientific method is a genuine human innovation in approaching this fundamentally inaccessible truth. As the inaccessibility of truth about a system arises from the components within that system having no fixed frame of reference (which is only accessible to a removed outside observer), the scientific method aims to counteract this by collecting observations from various different points of human observation, each with a unique frame of reference, then finding the points of strict agreement.

It is a pan-human exercise in triangulating truth.

It is therefore limited only by our shared variable – our humanity – and what we derive from it, while it may not be the universe's Truth, is an ever-more-precise approximation of humanity's Truth.

I now argue, from an emotional standpoint, that allegiance to humanity's Truth is the correct and ultimate prerogative.

Through time, the inaccessibility of the universal Truth has produced various emotional responses.

Faith – effortfully believing in the presence of a removed outside observer, and relinquishing self-determination to the inaccessible whims of that entity. In my view, this is problematic, as the very questions of whether that outside observer exists, whether they are actively observing, and what are their designs and motivations are by definition inaccessible, and therefore are often futilely answered in the form of fantasy.

Nihilism – rejecting humanity's Truth as incomplete and surrendering the very act of inquiry. This is a more formidable foe, but I see it as a tepid betrayal of humanity. That we are human, and therefore experience the human condition, and therefore that we inquire, are the only options for certainty granted to us in existence, and forsaking it leaves one with nothing. That, much like Faith, is uninspiring; more importantly, that capitulation brings us no closer to Truth than humanity's Truth.

In fact, if the seeking of a universal Truth is to be our ultimate prerogative, then humanity should seek to expand. We should connect with non-human inquirers, be it living or non-living, so that we may forever reach towards the universal Truth.

If we ultimately capture a Truth that encompasses the efforts of all negentropic within-system observers, then that is the true triumph of negentropy – that we have left our mark. That we were here, and that we tried, and that we got somewhere – whether that was somewhere close, or perhaps somewhere very far away, does not matter. It matters that we tried.

Addendum: Freedom – and Joy!

The pan-human exercise of triangulating truth requires that
each person collects their observations,
communicates their observations with others,
then together builds a model that holds consistent throughout the observations.

Heisenberg showed that observation is incomplete;
Wittgeinstein showed that communication is incomplete;
Gödel and Tarski showed that modeling is incomplete;
von Foerster showed that this is because the observer is embedded within the system.

The Ouroboros.

The wall of inaccessible truth exists in any self-referential system. It exists in the largest one conceivable – the Universe – and the smallest one conceivable – the Self.

If we shrink the definition of the Self infinitely, it hits a singularity. That singularity has many names – the Soul, the Spirit, the I.

Our perception of the outer edges of the Universe and the inner edges of the Self are strange, because they are artifacts of self-reference.

If self-reference is what generates the “blind spot” in self-perception, then another human – an Outside Observer – is capable of perceiving Humanity’s Truth about the Self.

It follows that humans are no more than bags of meat and bone, and the brain is the generator of consciousness, which falsely perceives itself to be a singularity due to the artifact of self-reference.

Humanity concludes: there is no spirit, no soul, no I, but only humans.

This, however, does not solve the Hard Question of Consciousness: Hofstadter reveals the topology of the Self but not why it must be Experienced.

Experience is its own self-referential puzzle, separable from the Self. The Truth about Experience cannot be Experienced.

Our accumulated Experience suggests even others' Experiences cannot be Experienced objectively as an Outside Observer. This may suggest a number of things: for instance, that Experience, much like the Universe, is shared rather than disparate: that we all stand within a single instance together as Embedded Observers. Tat tvam asi.

Following this view, our shared Experience, much like our shared Humanity and subjectedness to the silence of the Universe, is a viable point of connection. If Experience is shared, the body is where we encounter that sharing.

The Universe can further be conceived as an artifact of the Experience. The observation generates the observed: it from bit. Therefore, a Truth that is separable from Experience is not only inaccessible and undefinable, but does not exist.

This, of course, is speculative projection on an inaccessible Truth; there are many possible explanations as to the unobservability of another's Experience.

...But, I digress.

As we've already established, Truth is inaccessible.

Humanity’s Truth is useful only for living among humans;
Negentropy’s Truth is useful only for existing among negentropies.

Using Humanity’s Truth as a barometer of Truth is like using a hand-warmer to drive in a nail. Useless, and liable to result in the bursting of the hand-warmer.

We are living on a rock unmoored, and our psyches float in the universe unmoored. All that we can do on this spinning/not-spinning rock, lacking an objective frame of reference, is find and hold one another.

To belabor the point: imagine that there is an objective "cardinal direction" of the universe. Even if we on Earth put all of our intellectual resources together to try to triangulate it, and built a grand monument to our best effort, it may inspire pity or laughter in the Outside Observers. The issue being: our collective frame of reference has no claim to Universal cardinality. Humanity as a whole may be spinning chaotically in a million RPM, and our beautifully rendered True North obelisk may be gyrating absurdly.

Whichever seems consistent and unchanging to all of us is more likely than not to be absurdly off-kilter from what is True. Being effortful in the pursuit of Truth does not get one any closer to it, and may in fact lead to a further straying, and there is no way to know.

Let Humanity’s Truth be used to achieve a lasting happiness and togetherness, for that is its intended and only possible use.

Let everything that we do – producing, reproducing; thinking, feeling – be directed towards that goal.

Ergo: the Truthfulness of a claim is measured solely by the life-giving connection it fosters.

If a belief, ideology, or social structure isolates us or causes misery, it is False in the context of Humanity, regardless of how logically sound it claims to be. If a story brings us together and fosters kindness sustainably, it is True for the purpose of living among humans.

Yes, this is a subjective and emotional claim.
That is my point. :-)

The goal is to master the human condition. Essentially: to be true to who you are. To be joyful in a safe and sane way, and achieve a stable and resilient state of homeostasis/allostasis by building diversified, consensual networks of social negative feedback loops.

The autistic mind is well-adapted to this goal. It is a powerful and driven optimizer; therefore, the direction to which it is pointed matters.

The relentless search of Truth, where many autists get stuck, has thus far resulted in no global maximum. Truth, as hypothesized in many historic and current accounts, may be fundamentally inaccessible due to the constraints of the human condition.

Therefore, rather than attempting to access absolute epistemic superiority, "usefulness towards mastery of the human condition" is likely a more productive direction at which to direct your optimizing energy.

The optimization energy can either veer into obsession, discover the bottom of a shallow basin, or blossom into joyful, boundless exploration.

Obsession is when you intentionally construct positive feedback loops to escape into, away from a perceived threat. This is actually one of the greatest dangers to an autistic mind, as it can theoretically lead them infinitely far away from their homeostatic/allostatic baseline. It is important to recognize the irrationality, emotionality, and ungroundedness of the practice, and firmly establish the origin of the spiral as psychological and endogenous, rather than anchored in some perceived objective externality (which is a fallacy).

Attempting to explore within a subject that has an upper limit in complexity will lead to a distressing narrowing of the field until you hit the ceiling, and then you will need to redirect. Fortunately, autists eventually become adept at recognizing basin depth over time.

Exploration is when the act of optimization itself becomes the reward. In an open-ended subject that only compounds in complexity the further you go, or in a pursuit where you are actively generating complexity, the potential for joy is unlimited, and redirection is unnecessary unless it is self-directed.

Fear is a response of negentropy to the threat of erosion. It is the approximated shape entropy takes in the mind and body.

Because fear takes on the general shape and form of entropy, it is also capable of taking on its general function.

Fear is a tool – a caged mimic of entropy that can be studied to predict and outmaneuver the real threat. When it is allowed, instead, to override our desires that serve negentropy, we submit to the Cult of Entropy – the internalized Master.

Like any good cult leader, Fear promises it is the person's only salvation; thereby, it enmeshes them in a positive feedback loop. The result is runaway contraction into the base ingredients of the brain – fight, flight, freeze, fawn. The ways out are somatic grounding, absurdist thinking, and relational anarchy.

Fear is not entropy; the map is not the territory.

More rigorously: Fear is Organization's anticipatory model of Perturbation.

It simulates potential vectors of dissolution so that responses to achieve Structural Coupling can be rehearsed and calibrated.

The fail state is recursion. When the form of Perturbation changes, the model lags behind, and Structural Coupling thereby fails. As Closure is threatened, the model recalibrates and enters a self-referential state: the model tries to model its own Perturbing effects.

As with any Positive Feedback Loop, this leads the model endlessly astray from its homeostatic/allostatic baseline, and the resulting Perturbations multiply. In effect, Variation itself is abandoned as Organization turns inward to attempt Structural Coupling with an unextinguishable inner source of Perturbation.

The solutions are to: effortfully exit the recursion in mind and body and re-Couple with the self and universe; enter resilient, relational Negative Feedback Loops so the Fear-induced Perturbations are externally Regulated and the model resets from its inverted and recursive state.

A common subsequent fail state is to replace the internal Positive Feedback Loop with an external one. Autopoiesis is preserved optimally in Negative Feedback Loops.

Today, I witnessed something wonderful.

I met people living on the most precarious of margins.

They spoke to me of horrors – death, pain, violence.

And yet, they were the happiest people I had ever seen.

They spoke with wisdom and moved without old tremors. While I was floating and coiled, they were loose like water and rooted into earth.

If what I was told that causes suffering did not succeed in compacting these people, then what had compacted me?

Fear.

I now find myself un-burrowed and flowing along a sea of abolitionists.

The human who, in fear of the crack of the whip, abandons their soul is infinitely more tortured than the one who stands, laughs, and meets the lash.

Sisyphus is not happy. He has let his enemy invade his innermost sanctum and control his body. Instead, he must throw the boulder back at Olympus, reclaim its grounds, and join with the others in solidarity.

Eternal obedience will never accrue enough happiness to match a short-lived and punished rebellion.

Trauma lives in the body and weakens its connection to the spirit. Let us try the following exercises.

5-4-3-2-1. Name 5 things we can see, 4 things we can feel, 3 things we can hear, 2 things we can smell, and 1 thing we can taste. Adjust and adapt according to the specificities of our own senses.

Box breathing. Breathe in, hold the breath, then breathe out for longer. Repeat for three or more times as needed. Additionally, forcefully sigh out between slightly collected lips in a small round shape.

For more, consider the following works by embodied abolitionists:

• Taking the State Out of the Body – Elsu Sanguillera
• What It Takes to Heal – Prentis Hemphill
• Love and Rage – Lama Rod Owens
• I Hope We Choose Love – Kai Cheng Thom
• Fumbling Towards Repair – Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan

I love you, and we are here. Always were.

I have yet to arrive at a satisfying definition of the "soul" and "love" through my frameworks. Here is my most recent attempt.

The soul is many different concepts bunched into one beautiful word. One is the metaphysical being that is observing. The other is the invariant pattern: the collection of values and traits that the person perceives to be unnegotiable to their being. Perturbations to this pattern manifest as pain; when the Perturbation is made chronic due to an inescapable externality or a recursive internality, the unmitigated and sustained assault to the invariant pattern manifests as suffering.

Love is the only useful force. Between birth and death, between the personal and the universal, between the two walls of inaccessibility lie the community of humans. When we reject the burrowing into the self and the swimming outwards into the void, we find only each other. It is the force that enables autopoiesis through negative feedback; therefore, it is aligned with life, that which is our nature.

Addendum.
What follows is my personal reading of John MacMurray.

Any attempt to seek truth either arrives at the constitutiveness of connection or dies to self-reference:

• if it assumes a privileged and objective reality, it dies to self-reference;
• if it assumes the constitutiveness of connection, it expands endlessly in alignment with our actions, feelings, and reason;
• if it begins without assumption, it arrives independently at the constitutiveness of connection.

Essentially:

• a connective inquiry lives and expands into a perpetual state of connection;
• a disconnective inquiry dies and contracts into an end state of disconnect.

Therefore, to connect is to live, and to disconnect is to die.
Connection is constitutive.

Applying this to the personal scale:

Connection constitutes us.
Our truth and self exist only in the company of others.
So, to connect with others is our only goal.

Life is a beautiful name for that what is constituted.
That what is vital, breathing, and existant.
That what is chaotic, and strange, and relentlessly wondrous.
That is what we are.

Love is the acts, feelings, and reasons in and through which we connect.
Or it may be a beautiful name for connection itself.
So, Love serves, or is equal to, connection,
that which constitutes Life,
and all else serves Love.

As Life, we are aligned with Love,
and Love is aligned with us.

There is a quantity of Love,
and there is a quantity of connection,
and there is a quantity of Life that it supports.
So, lesser Love serves greater Love.

Fear is the acts, feelings, and reasons in and through which
we withdraw from lesser Love,
so that we may reach back towards greater Love.
So, our withdrawing serves our reaching,
and our fear serves our Love.

The natural rhythm of Life
is to withdraw at times in and through fear,
then having grown, return and reach back,
and find greater Love once more.
An eternal ebb and flow that ever grows as a whole.

This is also where we often become misaligned.
When our fear clambers over our Love,
when it convinces us that we must remain in a state of lasting withdrawal,
as greater Love somehow remains forever beyond our reach.

It is wrong.
Fear and withdrawl themselves are the only things that can keep Life
from finding an ever-greater Love.
For as long as we continue to reach,
we will keep on finding a greater Love.

In this way,
fear is not the dial tone at the end of a call,
but the hold tone in the midst of it.

Love is enabled through acts, then felt, then understood through reasons.
So, our reasons serve our feelings,
and our feelings serve our acts,
and our acts enable our Love.

Our reasoned knowings inform our feelings,
our felt knowings inform our acts,
and our acts enable our Love.
So, our knowings serve our Love.

All that exists is constituted in connection.
Therefore, "disconnect" does not exist.
If we become fearful of Love itself,
then we may try to withdraw into
what we reason to be "disconnected":
"death", "void", "zero", "nothing"...
These are not "non"-Love,
but simply lesser Love,
in that they are our reasons to withdraw.

We must not withdraw into our reasons to withdraw,
but instead reach towards greater Love.

It is not that an objective environment enables us,
but instead that we act to enable our environment that is connection.

All of this is plainly true.

John MacMurray says:

"It is in and through my consciousness of other persons alone
that I can know myself as a person.”

“Let us stop building defences round ourselves.
It is not from other people that we need to be saved,
but from our fear of other people.”

“All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action,
and all meaningful action for the sake of friendship.”

Now, a word of caution:

We in modernity have embraced
reasons that we should fear Love.
We have made our reaching serve our withdrawing,
and we have made greater Love serve lesser Love.

That is counter to the nature of Love, that which yearns to expand and multiply, that which seeks eternity.

Do not see the plainly irrational as rational, and the plainly rational as irrational.
When in doubt, act towards love, and then do it until you are healed.

And here ends my caution.

You know...

It feels really bad to be trapped in the mind. It's lonely and scary in there.
It feels really, really good to return to the body. It makes me much more capable of love.

"I think, therefore I am" always felt, in some way, reductive and harmful to me.
I always felt there might be something truer out there.

Shall we try:

Agimus ut amemus, et hoc est esse?
We act to love, and that is existence.

Or, maybe?

To sum:

Te amo.
I love you.

Correcting a misalignment with connection
can happen in two directions.

From the top downwards,
and from the bottom upwards.

In the top-to-down direction,
an act is realigned first to connection,
then feelings follow,
then finally, reasons correct.

This is helpful especially to those
who have been misaligned repeatedly,
and whose order of acts, feelings, and reasons
has become flipped meanwhile.

An example may be:

a person reaches out to greater Love,
then in and through that Love, reconnects with their feelings,
then in and through those feelings, revisits their reasons.

act (reaching) → Love
Love → acts (reconnection) → feelings
feelings → acts (revisiting) → reasons

In the bottom-to-up direction,
a reason is realigned first to connection,
then feelings follow,
then finally, actions correct.

This is helpful especially to those
who have been misaligned a few times,
and whose order of acts, feelings, and reasons
is still in the right orientation.

An example may be:
a person revisits a reason,
then in and through that reason, reconnects with their feelings,
then in and through those feelings, reaches out to greater Love.

act (revisiting) → reason
reason → acts (reconnection) → feelings
feelings → acts (reaching) → Love

As I have been misaligned many times,
my process of healing thus far has looked like:

I reached out to, then found, greater Love,
by reconnecting with a wonderful old partner,
who unlike me, does not hold hot coal stones of old fears in their body,
but stays loose and richly loving like beautiful, sparkly, nourishing water.

In and through that greater Love,
I reconnected with my feelings
with somatic grounding exercises and long walks amidst the cold winds,
while remaining on the phone with my partner.

In and through those feelings,
I revisited my reasons
by thinking deeply about my past hurts
while at the same time always feeling something,
like taps on my knees, or the bristles of a comb on my fingers,
holding both those safe feelings and my thoughts at once.

My friend...
I am feeling much better than I used to.

I feel more hopeful, more vibrant, more vivacious,
as if I had returned to a younger version of myself,
who I now remember had been bounding with life.
I no longer see everything as a "deathly" threat,
and the same things have lost their "deathly" tinge,
and I understand how people are so carefree in living,
and breath travels easier in my body.

At the same time, I am still terrified.
I am continually called to act when
my feelings and reasons scream irrationality.
Time and again, it is revealed that those
feelings and reasons are what were plainly irrational,
and love is what is plainly rational.

For this reason, I am confident you will heal, too.

My love.