It is funny the most popular book in China Three Body Problem is basically a summary of this. Everyone knows it however , American are indulged in something entirely different, infinite gdp growth.
The United States is a relatively new global power; it doesn’t fully understand what it means to coexist with nature. China, on the other hand, has learned this throughout its 5,000 years of rise and fall. Core philosophies in Chinese culture promote harmony and oneness between humanity and nature. This thinking has branched into many schools of thought—Confucianism, Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism in antiquity, and later, unfortunately humiliated and influenced by the West, communism and now state capitalism.
If this post-industrial world is to survive capitalism, the highly evolved predatory "bacteria" of our system must somehow devolve into something more like tiny cyanobacteria. But that is not possible, so we continue down the path of self-destruction in a world of finite resources—toward the end of humanity as we know it.
In the end, human civilization may be like the cyanobacteria at the dawn of life: it changes the ecosystem and gives rise to a new biological explosion, only to be a placeholder in deep time. China has long understood this cyclical nature. As one of the Four Classic Novels, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, opens: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, it must divide. Thus it has ever been.”
The West has given humanity technology, but that technology now accelerates our own replacement. The book The Three-Body Problem has a narrative regarding an extraterrestrial race trying to survive in an unpredictable era of chaos and stability. That race is actually a reference to Earth. Except, as mortal beings, we don’t have a grand appreciation for the world we live in; extinction, ice age—they are just words with no power to drive a sense of survival. We are living too comfortably to see the peril of humanity. Reread The Three-Body Problem; maybe some will find in it the existential fear that has long been gone in American culture.
It is funny the most popular book in China Three Body Problem is basically a summary of this. Everyone knows it however , American are indulged in something entirely different, infinite gdp growth.
The United States is a relatively new global power; it doesn’t fully understand what it means to coexist with nature. China, on the other hand, has learned this throughout its 5,000 years of rise and fall. Core philosophies in Chinese culture promote harmony and oneness between humanity and nature. This thinking has branched into many schools of thought—Confucianism, Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism in antiquity, and later, unfortunately humiliated and influenced by the West, communism and now state capitalism.
If this post-industrial world is to survive capitalism, the highly evolved predatory "bacteria" of our system must somehow devolve into something more like tiny cyanobacteria. But that is not possible, so we continue down the path of self-destruction in a world of finite resources—toward the end of humanity as we know it.
In the end, human civilization may be like the cyanobacteria at the dawn of life: it changes the ecosystem and gives rise to a new biological explosion, only to be a placeholder in deep time. China has long understood this cyclical nature. As one of the Four Classic Novels, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, opens: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, it must divide. Thus it has ever been.”
The West has given humanity technology, but that technology now accelerates our own replacement. The book The Three-Body Problem has a narrative regarding an extraterrestrial race trying to survive in an unpredictable era of chaos and stability. That race is actually a reference to Earth. Except, as mortal beings, we don’t have a grand appreciation for the world we live in; extinction, ice age—they are just words with no power to drive a sense of survival. We are living too comfortably to see the peril of humanity. Reread The Three-Body Problem; maybe some will find in it the existential fear that has long been gone in American culture.