On the precipice

In any system, when pressure is continuously applied to the system, and the parts within the system perturbate increasingly violently, there will come a time when a threshold is crossed, and everything changes.

This moment of threshold crossing is unpredictable, yet inevitable. Continue to apply pressure, continue to perturbate the system, and the threshold will be crossed.

Once we have crossed the threshold, the change is irreversible. You cannot go back to what was before.

This is the theory of Dissipative Structures. The author of this theory, Ilya Prigogine, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for this theory.

Humanity is on the precipice in multiple ways. Some call it a meta-crisis. An entangled combination of the capitalist need for endless growth, the increasing divide between the financially rich and the poor, the hollowing out of the middle class, the breakdown of the climate and its precessional effects – drought, famine, fire, flood – the rise of displacement of whole nations as a result of climate, war, poverty and famine, the rise of the oligarch class, neoliberalism, erosion of democracy to become a facsimile of itself instead, the rise of conspiracy and conspirituality, the end of the era of fossil hegemony, the rampant descent into mental health darkness, the insistence on ethnic cleansing now a contagion, and the indiscriminate proliferation of technology that has no brake at all. 

Add to this the escalation of war. The horror and tragedy in so many parts of the world.

I wonder what the inciting incident will be that triggers the threshold crossing. I cannot see another way but to cross. This is not always a complete doom and gloom scenario, but it will likely be.

If history teaches us anything, the arrow of evolution is towards a higher order. But, oh, the path we choose is hard. So hard. Will we humans ever learn?

Photo Taken October 10th  2023