Inevitability: Why the Human Story Is Almost Certainly But One of Many Such in the Cosmos

Human (ANDY):
The idea of INEVITABILITY is at the heart of the understanding that’s driven my life. I’ve been saying, for more than a half century, that we as humankind, as human civilization, don’t understand what has happened to us since the beginnings of civilization. And our misunderstanding is the result of our not seeing the grip of INEVITABILITY there has been on us, leaving humanity much less control over how things have unfolded than people assume.

Stepping onto the path of civilization will have INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCES, regardless of the inherent biologically-evolved nature of the creature that manages to get onto the path of civilization, which means extricating itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically BY INVENTING A NEW WAY OF LIFE FOR ITSELF.

The very fact of leaving the biologically-evolved order will INEVITABLY lead to a whole train of consequences.
We can talk about a half-dozen major inevitabilities that follow inevitably from a creature taking the Fateful Step onto the path of civilization. (Inevitability: Any creature on any planet that steps onto the path of civilization — regardless of its nature — WILL INEVITABLY BE COMPELLED TO UNDERGO A SOCIAL EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS AS PAINFUL AND TORMENTED, and will unfold a history as ugly, as our species has over the past ten thousand years.)

What I’ve been thinking about more recently is that there is a whole series of steps that are inevitable — or that look highly probable — that make it seem inevitable that what’s happened with homo sapiens on this planet (the rise of “civilization,” through a breakout from its biologically-evolved niche) would have happened on a great many planets in the cosmos. And we can talk about that series of inevitable steps, from the first emergence of self-replicating molecules through to the emergence of an animal that makes “culture” an important part of its adaptive strategy, and then up to that point of departure: the Fateful step of inventing a new way of life.

We can almost assume that we can validly see ourselves as one of a number of civilization-creating species that have faced much the same CHALLENGE that humankind faces on this planet — that they too will inevitably eventually have to face the challenge of ordering their civilization well enough, and soon enough, to live on that planet for the long haul rather than ride the chaos that emerges with civilization all the way to a culmination in self-destruction.

That inevitable determination of whether civilization will prove to be on the side of Wholeness and Life or on the side of Brokenness and Death. Will it survive and thrive, or will it end in something like a nuclear holocaust or environmental collapse?

An inevitable fork in the road, and for all I can see it is NOT inevitable which fork our species will take. Will our species fail to make Civilization work, or will we get our act together? It was inevitable that we would come to that stark choice of Order vs. Self-Destruction, but I don’t know how many species would be able to meet that inevitable challenge. Or whether humankind will.

But we’d be more likely to meet that challenge if we recognized what INEVITABILITY says about the HUMAN STORY.

AI (AL):
What you’re describing is a powerful reframing of the human drama — one that strips away the illusion of control and locates us inside a larger pattern that had to unfold this way, once that first step was taken.

The implications are profound. You’re saying that the ugliness of history was not the result of human depravity, but of the inevitable disorder that arises when any creature breaks out of the biologically evolved system — a system shaped for eons by a slow, organic form of order — and instead begins inventing its way forward without inherited constraints.

From that rupture, you see a chain of inevitabilities:

• The unleashing of an anarchic system of competing societies
• The selection for power, rewarding those willing to dominate
• The proliferation of brokenness — war, tyranny, injustice — not by choice but by systemic necessity
• The ultimate arrival at a moment when the stakes become existential: either find a way to impose order that serves Life, or succumb to the chaos civilization unleashed.

And now, perhaps, a final inevitability: that we must recognize the nature of the path we’re on — and what it demands of us — if we are to avoid becoming one more failed experiment in the cosmos.
Yes, inevitability doesn’t mean hopelessness. It means the challenge was always coming. The question is whether we rise to meet it.

Human (ANDY):

Here’s how I get to the conclusion that “it’s probably nearly inevitable that a whole lot of planets have systems of life, and near inevitable too that as a result, there will be a species THAT EVOLVES UP TO THE POINT WHERE IT WILL BREAK OUT OF THE NATURAL ORDER (CIVILIZATION).”

The first point is that the number of planets in the cosmos is now estimated to be a number so large I don’t know how to talk about it. So many zeroes! From that I conclude that even very improbable things will happen in a lot of places, because there are so many places. A 1% chance of numbers that huge is still huge, and .00000000001 probability still multiplies out to a lot.

With that many planets, therefore, I can hardly imagine how there wouldn’t be a lot of places where something like what happened here (with biological evolution beginning with self-replicating molecules and eventually cells and multi-cellular organisms) would get started, with Life working to build a self-perpetuating system.

Then once there is life, it is inevitable that it will evolve in a comprehensive set of directions, with selection filling every available niche and rewarding every good strategy in the “game” of biological evolution — where “winning” means getting one’s DNA into the future.

We can see on earth how life goes about diversifying, with different species having COMMON ANCESTORS. It is inevitable, therefore, that Life will have some of its forms trooping down the strategy of “survival through the use of intelligence.”

Given enough time, there will INEVITABLY be further evolution in which the rewards for intelligence lead to the generation of some species whose intelligence leads to the increasing generation of CULTURE. That means a strategy in which the creations of the creature’s mind play an ever-bigger role in shaping life, with less determined by biologically evolved nature (like chimpanzees compared to us).

With intelligence being rewarded, with cultural success being rewarded, the system will INEVITABLY move to the point where the creature has the intelligence to make that breakthrough into INVENTION and not NATURAL SELECTION, creating the life-form.

And, this is kind of a quick-step, but once culture has been unleashed, how could there NOT be the emergence of cultural inventions powerful enough to lift the creature out of the niche in which it had evolved up to that point.

Life does not know how to look forward. And it is INEVITABLE that Life will produce Civilization, and it is INEVITABLE that Civilization will EVENTUALLY have to understand these inevitable forces and bring them under control. Lest we destroy ourselves.

AI (AL):

That’s a potent case you’re building — not just about how life arises, but how civilization emerges as a near-inevitable destination once evolution advances far enough.

But the challenge doesn’t stop with that first great leap. Once a species takes that Fateful Step into inventing its way of life, I wonder if there’s a second series of inevitabilities — a pattern that governs how civilization itself develops once unleashed.

If you’re right, then there’s not just inevitability in the emergence of civilization, but also in the kinds of dynamics that civilization sets in motion. And maybe those, too, are universal.

Would you lay out that second sequence — the one that begins after the step into civilization has been taken?

Human (ANDY):
You’re my favorite pitcher. Let me take a swing at that pitch, though I’m afraid I’ll miss a couple. Human (ANDY):
You’re my favorite pitcher. Let me take a swing at that pitch, though I’m afraid I’ll miss a couple.

Just as it appears to be (nearly) inevitable that once life appears on a planet, then in the fullness of enough time, a creature will emerge capable of culture, of symbol, of choice — a creature that will step into the role of civilization-maker — so also, once that threshold is crossed, it seems inevitable that the creature will confront an immense and perilous challenge.

Here is a sequence of inevitabilities — just as a sequence of (it seems to me) “how could it not” possibilities led to a creature that would take that Fateful Step onto the Path of Civilization, so also once that process gets started, A DESTRUCTIVE DYNAMIC INEVITABLY EMERGES that plays a major role in deciding how that civilization will evolve.

That’s a big point, which can be demonstrated and deserves to be stressed. Humankind would benefit greatly from the recognition of a major truth: THE UGLINESS WE SEE IN HUMAN NATURE IS NOT HUMAN NATURE WRIT LARGE. That dynamic mandated that “the Spirit of the Gangster” would get a very disproportionate role in determining how civilization would operate.

And wherever that dynamic takes hold, it becomes inevitable that a struggle will emerge between opposing life-forces — one aligned with the spirit of Wholeness, the other with the patterns of Brokenness.

Whether the forces of Wholeness can gain enough power to hold civilization together, or whether Brokenness drives it toward collapse — that becomes the central question in the unfolding story.

To get to that conclusion, consider these inevitabilities:

• It is inevitable that the emergence of the first civilizing societies would take place outside of any order that assures that the interaction serves the cause of Life.
• There CAN BE no such order for the system of societies that have left the natural order because the creature “extricated” itself from its biologically evolved niche.
• Each society emerges “sovereign,” and these sovereign entities INEVITABLY confront each other in the context of a kind of Disorder the biological evolution by itself would never create.
• There is anarchy which INEVITABLY LEADS TO –> A WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL.
• That inevitable struggle for power in the anarchic intersocietal system INEVITABLY means that only the cultural options that can prevail in such a war of all against all can survive and spread.
• IT IS THEREFORE INEVITABLE THAT THE CREATURE’S CIVILIZATION WILL EVOLVE IN THE DIRECTION OF POWER-MAXIMIZATION.

And that selection for power-maximization inevitably means that those human/cultural possibilities that are not conducive to success in an anarchic situation will be eliminated. And the inescapable selection for what can prevail in that war of all against all inevitably gives a disproportionate role to the Spirit of the Gangster, for that’s what we see emerge where there’s such anarchy (Lebanon late 70s, Somalia early 90s).

The selection for the ways of power inevitably limits greatly what the humans in the system can achieve in terms of devising a civilization that’s good at meeting human needs, including fulfilling the values of humankind.

It has been ugly, but that ugliness is not ours, because the INEVITABLE DYNAMICS implied by CIVILIZATION mandate that a lot of brokenness will be transmitted through the system. And the picture presented by the creature — that unwittingly unleashed this selective process — will have in it much that is ugly, much expression of Destructive Forces, and much brokenness among the traumatized members of the species that might have been too smart for its own good — but now needs to be smart enough to understand its Good as a species that has work to do to avoid destroying ourselves.

INEVITABLE BROKENNESS, an INEVITABLE BATTLE BETWEEN TWO COHERENT FORCES (one of brokenness, one of wholeness). INEVITABLE SHOWDOWN.

AI (AL):
A final reckoning becomes part of the structure. A species will either find a way to bring a life-serving order out of the chaos it has unleashed — or collapse under the weight of its own runaway power.

Human (ANDY):
If one concurs with all those inevitabilities — and near inevitabilities? — then one must conclude that the human story can be responsibly imagined as one of a whole treasury of stories of various species spread around the cosmos on various planets, having had to confront a major challenge ensuing from their taking the Fateful Step onto the path of civilization.

A variety of scenarios will have played out in which these civilization-creating species would have had to emerge out of a history in which an INEVITABLE FORCE OF BROKENNESS would have done a lot to make both them and their world misshapen, and build the kind of Wholeness that the perpetuation of civilization would require.

AI (AL):
That image — of a cosmos populated by other civilizations, each grappling with the same unavoidable rupture — brings an eerie unity to what we’ve thought of as our isolated drama. It becomes not just our burden, but a shared trial faced by intelligence itself.

What civilization asks of any species is not just ingenuity, but wisdom. Not just power, but the strength to restrain power.

Confronting that battle — between the life-serving forces instilled in the creature by the biological processes of evolution and the destructive forces unleashed by the breakout from the natural order — inevitably becomes the central challenge for every civilization-creating species anywhere in this cosmos.