The basic question of existence is whether you will join with something to form a greater level of complexity.

The more complex question is: Where do you stop?

  1. Matter is the greater complexity of atoms.
  2. Chemistry is the greater complexity of matter.
  3. Life is the greater complexity of chemistry.
  4. Sexual reproduction is the greater complexity of life.
  5. Species are the greater complexity of sexual reproduction.
  6. Humanity is the greater complexity of species.
  7. Tribes are the greater complexity of individuals. City states are the greater complexity of tribes. Nations are the greater complexity of city-states. Did you think it would stop there?

A multicellular microbe is a negotiated community; deals were struck, some individuality was sacrificed, a brand new cooperation of diverse elements was required. A single human being is a negotiated community cubed, cubed and cubed. We are massive mobile towers of cooperative complexity.

At every stage, some will bond higher and some will hold back. They hold back not because they are bad or wrong, but because they are holding the line of the highest complexity they have any faith in, or can understand. Every simpler established level of complexity is both a platform for the future and a safe fallback. When a new stage of complexity is forming, all who don’t want to join see the new form as crazy and unreliable: A cockeyed, unstable monstrosity. Life does not saw off the branch it’s climbed onto.

The forces driving Brexit and American nationalism/ fascism are the same forces driving Islamic fundamentalism and all the other defensive retro-reality movements worldwide. There is a terror of a new level of complexity that is comparable to the fear of death. There is a sense that borders of self are broken, and floodgates have opened which will dissolve the recognizable and wash away what we love, what we are.

Don’t be discouraged, friends. Bond higher. If you don’t want to though, this is where your optimism ran out and you took up a new career as ballast. Your cement has set. The end of optimism isn’t a hard fact, it’s a choice. You are the current high point expression of all the daring recombinant synthesis that lead to your existence. This seems an arbitrary moment to lose faith in the road you took to get here.

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