Functional Persistence

I will get back to my series of notes on AI soon, I just wanted to document my thoughts on a discussion with a friend before I forgot what I was thinking at the time…

I met a new friend recently who told me nature is in harmony and humans are not. He wanted to talk about how a scalable community strategy might bring us back into alignment with the natural world. I nodded through most of it and let the conversation end, but it stayed with me all afternoon. By evening I realized I disagreed with some of his premise, and was unsettled, not by his question, but the fact that I had been walking around for weeks carrying a related dread without quite naming it. He was asking why humans are not in harmony. I have been asking why some societies around the world appear like they are coming apart. The two questions turn out to be the same question approached from different angles, which is the thing I want to work out here.

The dread is not private, and it is not paranoid. Trust in institutions has weakened across countries. Economic security has eroded for many people. Official long range forecasting now describes our societies as increasingly disillusioned, informed, and divided. Research on sustained uncertainty treats it not as minor annoyance but as a condition linked to stress, anxiety, pessimism, and broader mental health strain. The American middle class fell from 61% of adults in 1971 to 51% in 2023. One in six people worldwide report experiencing loneliness. The World Economic Forum named misinformation and disinformation the top short term global risk of 2025. The old map that told people who they were, what their work meant, and why the future was worth the present has broken, and nothing has replaced it. So when someone offers me a tidy story about harmony restored, I notice it, because I want it to be true.

I personally dont believe the harmony part is true. But the instinct that sent him toward community as the answer i believe could be right, for reasons he may not have had in mind. To see why, I had to start with the nature claim and follow it down to where it actually leads, which is the same place the collapse dread leads, by a different route.

Start with nature. The idea of nature in harmony is a romantic inheritance from Rousseau and the Romantics, amplified by nature documentaries that frame predation as majestic and starvation as off camera. Modern ecology has largely abandoned the balance of nature concept. What ecosystems actually exhibit is dynamic disequilibrium, constant competition, and frequent violence. Without any human involvement, nature runs on predation, parasitism, disease, starvation, infanticide, and resource warfare. Most wild animals die young and die badly. Populations oscillate, crash, and sometimes collapse entirely. Species drive other species extinct without our help. There were five mass extinctions before humans existed, including the Permian extinction roughly 252 million years ago, a volcanic and climatic catastrophe that wiped out roughly 90% of marine species. At smaller scales a forest is not a harmonious community. Trees wage slow chemical warfare on competitors, starve their neighbors of light, and hijack fungal networks. Parasitic wasps lay eggs inside living hosts that are then eaten alive from the inside out. Male lions kill cubs when they take over a pride, which is the family group of a dozen or so lions that hunt and raise young together. Chimpanzees conduct organized raids against neighboring groups.

What nature does have is not harmony but what I would call functional persistence. Energy flows, nutrients cycle, and the system keeps running even as individuals and species churn through it. It is closer to a stable war than a peaceful dance. That distinction matters because it changes the question. The question is not how we rejoin a harmony that was never there. The question is how we stop disrupting a functional persistence that actually was.

Which brings me to us. If nature runs on dynamic disequilibrium and humans are a product of nature, where does our particular talent for disruption come from? My friend seemed to think we are uniquely out of step. The more accurate framing is that we are not uniquely broken. We are the first species whose cognitive and technological capacities let us modify the planet faster than our evolved restraints could catch up.

Consider what got selected in our lineage. High intelligence and tool use, because they let our ancestors outcompete other hominids and extract more energy from the environment. Social cooperation within the tribe paired with aggression toward the out group, because that combination won conflicts over resources. Status competition, because higher status meant more reproductive success. Loss aversion and short time horizons, because in an environment where you might die tomorrow the future was a bad bet. Capacity for culture and cumulative learning, which let adaptations spread faster than genes could. Pattern recognition that finds agency everywhere, because seeing a predator that is not there costs less than missing one that is.

Every one of these traits was locally optimal on the African savanna. None of them was designed for what we became, because evolution does not design. What exists is a set of dispositions that worked in the ancestral environment and now misfire at a scale that environment never contemplated. Sweet tastes worked when sugar was scarce. In a world of industrial food they produce diabetes. Tribal loyalty worked when the tribe was a hundred and fifty people who depended on each other. In a world of billions it produces nationalism, genocide, and an inability to cooperate on shared threats. Status competition worked when status was local and the resources it competed for were limited. In a world of global media and extractive technology it produces billionaires and consumption arms races that strip the biosphere.

This is the key point, and it is the one most people get backwards. We did not evolve to destroy. We evolved a set of capacities that required cultural restraint to avoid destroying their own conditions. For most of human history those restraints existed. Taboos that forbade certain foods, acts, or places as sacred and untouchable. Religious restrictions that limited work, consumption, and warfare on holy days. Common property regimes that governed the use of shared forests, pastures, and fisheries by the people who lived near them. Kinship obligations that required a person to feed, shelter, and defend relatives by blood and marriage whether it was convenient or not. These restraints were imperfect but they worked well enough that hunter gatherer societies persisted for hundreds of thousands of years without wrecking their ecosystems, and many traditional agricultural societies sustained themselves for millennia. The rupture is not human nature. The rupture is the systematic dismantling of those cultural restraint systems, a process that accelerated when markets (global commodity exchanges that price food and labor across continents), states (the modern bureaucratic nation with its standing army and tax apparatus), and industrial technology (factories, railroads, container shipping, the internet) broke the scale at which traditional institutions (the parish church, the village council, the guild, the extended household) could function.

What this produced is a kind of ecological disruption that is categorically different from natural churn, and it is worth being specific about how, because the specificity is what makes the problem intelligible and also what reveals the parallel to the social unraveling I started with.

The first mechanism is speed. Ecosystem homeostasis runs on evolutionary and geological timescales. Coral reefs coevolved with ocean chemistry over hundreds of millions of years. Forest communities migrated with climate shifts at rates measured in meters per decade. Industrial civilization is pushing temperature, ocean pH, and atmospheric composition at rates that compress those timescales by orders of magnitude. Adaptation cannot keep up. Current extinction rates are running roughly a thousand times higher than natural background rates, and projected future rates are closer to ten thousand times higher.

The second is scale. Natural disturbances are usually local. A volcanic eruption, a wildfire, a regional drought. Species persist because refugia exist elsewhere and repopulation happens from the edges. Industrial civilization is the first disturbance that hits every ecosystem simultaneously. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is the same over the Amazon and the Gobi. Microplastics are in Arctic ice and Mariana Trench sediment. There is nowhere left unaffected, which means there is nowhere to recolonize from.

The third is novelty. Biology evolved responses to the chemicals and energies that existed in the biosphere for hundreds of millions of years. We have introduced compounds that had no place there. PFAS that do not break down. Neonicotinoids at doses insects never encountered. Radioactive isotopes concentrated beyond natural levels. Pharmaceutical residues in every waterway. Organisms have no evolved response because these things were not in the evolutionary environment.

The fourth is simplification. Ecosystems get their robustness from redundancy, meaning many species doing similar functional work so the system keeps running when any one of them fails. We have stripped that redundancy out at global scale. Humans account for roughly 36% of mammal biomass, domesticated livestock for about 60%, and wild mammals for only 4%. Wild terrestrial mammal biomass has fallen sevenfold and marine mammal biomass fivefold compared to pre human baselines. We have replaced diverse biotas, meaning the rich mix of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes that make up a healthy ecosystem, with monocultures of a few species we find useful, which is to say fields of corn, soy, wheat, cattle, chickens, and pigs stretched across continents. When any of those monocultures fails there is nothing behind it.

Now look at the society I described at the start. The same four mechanisms are at work, on a different substrate. A rumor now travels around the planet in hours while a legislature takes years to deliberate, which is speed. A factory closes in Ohio because of a policy decision in Beijing, and a pandemic in Wuhan shutters storefronts in Lisbon, which is scale no local institution can absorb. TikTok’s recommendation algorithm shapes what a fourteen year old believes about her own body in ways no parent, teacher, or priest has any evolved cultural response to, which is novelty. And the thick middle layer of civic life, meaning the churches, unions, lodges, guilds, bowling leagues, parent teacher associations, neighborhood associations, extended families, and local newspapers that once sat between the isolated individual and the distant state, has been stripped down to a thin film of market relationships with employers and platforms on one side and national media on the other, which is simplification. What I have been calling the collapse dread is not a different phenomenon from the ecological disruption. It is the same set of mechanisms operating on the human institutions that were supposed to hold us together.

This is why I think the common response to each crisis tends to fail. People propose a technical fix for the climate, a policy fix for inequality, a platform fix for misinformation, a therapeutic fix for loneliness, and each fix targets a symptom of a deeper stripping that the fix cannot address. You cannot restore redundancy, meaning the overlapping backup capacity of multiple institutions doing similar work, through a single regulation. You cannot restore meaning, meaning the felt sense that your life is part of something larger than your survival, through a policy. You cannot restore trust, meaning the willingness to act on what another person tells you without first verifying it, through a communications campaign.

Now imagine you wanted to govern your way out of all of it anyway. Every one of those four mechanisms maps to a governance failure mode, and the reforms needed to address each one cut against the structural incentives of every existing state. Matching ecological and social speed would require institutions that can make credible commitments across generations. Constitutional lock ins on ecological parameters, longer electoral cycles, and fiduciary duties to future people, meaning a legally binding obligation on today’s decision makers to protect the interests of generations not yet born, similar to the duty a trustee owes to the beneficiary of a trust. Wales has tried one version with its Wellbeing of Future Generations Act. Ecuador has rights of nature in its constitution. New Zealand granted the Whanganui River legal personhood. These are real experiments, and they sit at the margins. The core democracies still run on electoral cycles of two to six years, which guarantees that any cost deferred beyond that window gets deferred.

Matching scale would require binding supranational authority over the commons, meaning a governing body with real enforcement power over the shared resources of the planet such as the atmosphere, the oceans, and the climate system. It would be funded by instruments like carbon and biodiversity tariffs, for example a tax imposed on imports from countries that do not price their emissions or protect their ecosystems, and enforced through trade exclusion, meaning cutting a non compliant country out of the global trading system until it complies. That governance form does not exist at the scale required, and the political conditions for building it are moving in the opposite direction. Addressing novelty would require reversing the regulatory default, which today lets a producer deploy a new chemical, technology, or financial instrument first and forces the public to prove harm after the fact. The reversed default would make the producer prove safety before release. Europe’s precautionary principle, the legal doctrine that regulators should act to prevent harm when the evidence is plausible but not yet conclusive, is a weak version of this, and even that is under constant assault. Addressing simplification would require antitrust enforcement across agriculture and finance, because concentration in those sectors creates the same fragility a monoculture does in a field, where a single seed company or a single bank failure cascades globally. It would also require commons governance of the kind Elinor Ostrom documented, meaning the cooperative management of shared resources by the people who actually use them, such as the fishing cooperatives of coastal Maine or the village irrigation systems of Bali. And it would require protection of genetic and cultural diversity as public goods, meaning things that benefit everyone and cannot be adequately provided by markets, like clean air, basic scientific research, or biodiversity itself. This contradicts the operating logic of the last fifty years, which treated efficiency as the primary virtue and stripped buffers out of every system.

Stack the political economy on top, by which I mean the fact that every one of these reforms runs into the same wall of concentrated wealth. Concentrated wealth captures politics and blocks any move that threatens extractive returns. Rich democracies are moving toward oligarchic governance, not away from it. Authoritarian states can move faster on some fronts but their legitimacy depends on growth and their elites have extractive interests of their own. Developing states, by which I mean countries like Nigeria, Indonesia, or Vietnam that are still building out basic infrastructure, have legitimate development claims that cannot be honored within current ecological limits unless rich states fund the transition, which they will not. Fragile states, by which I mean countries like Haiti, Somalia, or Yemen where basic governance has collapsed, have no capacity for ecological or social governance at all. Every category has a structural reason why the reforms do not happen.

Add the psychology. Human cognition evolved for small group, short horizon, concrete threat environments. We are bad at prioritizing abstract distant harms over concrete near term gains. Loss aversion makes people defend existing privileges even when those privileges are lethal. In group bias makes global cooperation feel like betrayal of one’s people. Status competition drives consumption, consumption drives throughput, and throughput is the mechanism of disruption.

So the honest answer to what it would take is something close to impossible. Constitutional redesign, binding international authority, reversed regulatory defaults, anti concentration economic policy, redirected status and meaning systems, and a rebuilt middle layer of community of the kind I described earlier. No existing polity, meaning any organized political community from a city to a federation, is close to any of this. The pieces that exist are marginal or being actively dismantled.

But here is where I think most honest analyses stop too soon. The state cannot do most of this on its own even if it wanted to, because governance reform at that scale requires a cultural substrate the state cannot manufacture. And the cultural substrate is precisely what we have hollowed out. That middle layer of churches, unions, lodges, and neighborhood associations is not a nice to have. It is the thing that made the old system work, and its absence is why the new system keeps failing on every axis at once.

This is the point where the two questions I started with converge. The reason my friend wanted to talk about scalable community is that human beings are hungry for it in a way most of the political and economic analysis misses. The dominant emotional fact of our moment is not greed or rage but isolation. Living alone has risen across every world region. 19% of young adults in 2023 reported having no one they could count on for social support. That isolation is the condition that makes people most susceptible to demagogues, scams, conspiracy, consumption as substitute meaning, and the collapse of trust in anything larger than the self. It is the fuel for the dynamics that make governance reform impossible. Which means it is also the opening.

The practical solution is not a new party, a new technology, or a new state. It is the deliberate rebuilding of the middle layer through values based peer communities that can scale through social contagion rather than top down recruitment. We know this is possible because we have seen it happen. The early Methodist class meetings, which were small weekly gatherings of a dozen or so members who confessed their struggles, held each other accountable, and studied scripture together in the eighteenth century English working class. Alcoholics Anonymous, which grew in the twentieth century from two men in Ohio into a global network of millions through the same cell structure. Soka Gakkai, the Japanese lay Buddhist movement founded in 1930 that grew into a worldwide network of neighborhood discussion groups with millions of members and its own political party in Japan. The Black church tradition that powered the civil rights movement. The early labor movement’s mutual aid societies, the workers’ organizations that pooled dues to cover funerals, illness, disability, and unemployment in the decades before any welfare state existed. All of them grew through dense social networks using a cell or chapter structure. All of them provided meaning and belonging. All of them imposed specific commitments on members. All of them produced political and cultural effects far out of proportion to their membership. The mechanism exists. The hunger exists. What is missing is the deliberate construction of the right kind of community at the right scale for this moment.

The structural features I am describing (cells, referrals, specific commitments, values members are held to) are features that cults also have, and it is worth saying plainly what separates a healthy civic movement from one. A cult isolates members from outside relationships, centralizes authority in a charismatic leader whose word is final, extracts money and loyalty upward, demands metaphysical conformity as a condition of membership, and defines itself against the world. A healthy movement does the opposite. It expects members to maintain ties outside the group, rotates leadership under constitutional constraints, redistributes resources horizontally and outward, asks for behavioral commitments while leaving private belief free, and sees itself as part of a larger civic fabric it does not control. The cell structure alone tells you nothing, in the same way that cell growth alone tells you nothing about whether a body is healthy or has a tumor. The question is whether the growth serves the whole organism or consumes it. What Tocqueville described in the American civic associations of the 1830s, what Robert Putnam documented disappearing in the second half of the twentieth century, and what the labor movement and the Black church accomplished at their best were not cults. They were the middle layer doing its work. The design of any serious movement now has to build the safeguards against cult drift into the bones, which is what the criteria I am about to lay out are meant to do.

For such a movement to actually bend the curves I have been describing, it would need several things most current community movements do not provide. It would need commitments with teeth, because generic values of integrity and community are insufficient. Members would need to commit to specific behaviors that conflict with current consumption and political patterns, tracked and held by the community itself. It would need to cross class and culture, not just geography, so that a steel worker, a teacher, and a fisherman can be full members with equal standing to a tech executive. If a movement cannot cross class it becomes a networking club for winners of the current system, and it reinforces the dynamics it claims to address. It would need physical infrastructure, because virtual community plus periodic gathering does not reach the density required to replace what the traditional middle layer provided. Buildings, land, schools, commons, mutual aid networks. It would need a political theory of change, not only personal transformation, because personal transformation in even a hundred thousand people does not move the governance needle unless those people coordinate action on specific structural reforms. And it would need governance that outlasts its founders, with rotating leadership under real constitutional constraints, because charismatic leader organizations corrupt or collapse within a generation and the drift toward cult is almost always a drift toward a single unaccountable voice.

The middle layer rebuild is not a substitute for governance reform. It is the precondition for it. On simplification the community sector is itself the answer, because simplification is the stripping of that sector, and restoring it literally restores the redundancy the social system needs. On novelty, thick community is how a culture metabolizes the new without being swept away by it, because a parish or a union hall or a neighborhood association can say no to the phone in the classroom, the pesticide on the farm, or the algorithm in the child’s bedroom in a way a single parent or a single farmer cannot, and that cultural no is what makes regulatory action politically possible later. On scale, community produces the constituency that can demand binding supranational rules and punish the politicians who refuse them, because a population organized into peer groups with shared commitments can sustain long cross border campaigns that atomized individuals never can. And on speed, community cultivates citizens willing to vote for longer time horizons, to accept short term costs for generational benefits, and to hold states to the fiduciary duties that constitutional reform would codify. Community does not replace the state. It creates the conditions under which the state can act at the speed, scale, and novelty required, and under which markets can be forced to internalize the costs they have been externalizing for fifty years. Without that substrate no reform is durable. With it, reform becomes possible.

I do not know if such a movement will emerge and scale fast enough in time. The curves are steep and the window is narrowing. But I have come to think this is the only layer where change at the required scale can actually start, because the state cannot produce the cultural conditions for its own reform and the market cannot produce restraint. The opening has to come from people who choose to rebuild obligation and belonging and practical restraint with each other, in public, at a scale that others can join.

The reason the world feels like it is making less sense is that the structures which once made it feel coherent, fair, and shared are breaking at the same time, under the same four pressures, on ecological and social substrates alike. My friend started from the wrong premise about harmony, but he landed in the right place, because the deepest thing he was pointing at was that the answer is not in a return to nature and not in a retreat to the self. The answer, if there is one, is in the deliberate and patient rebuilding of the middle layer we let go of, with terms honest enough and commitments concrete enough to actually change what people do.