Civilizational Knot

Cutting the Complexity

[Letter #027]

Good morning, son.

Your mother is having a tough time moving around now. We’re just over a month away from your official due date, but the last appointment at the doctor had you measuring about two weeks ahead of schedule in size (you were in the 90th percentile), so it’s reasonable to think that you might demand your debut earlier than anticipated. As with everything in the world these days, it’s “faster than expected” here too.

I’m not very happy with last week’s letter. It was a little all over the place, and I think I want to revise it eventually. It probably happens to everyone, but I really beat myself up for shoddy work. I’ll try to fix it. Not today though. Today, I want to try to do a short one. First, a story.

Do you remember me teaching you about Alexander? He was the Macedonian king in the 4th century BC who conquered everything that folks in his part of the woods considered to be “the known world.” By this point, there were humans all over the actual planet, but if all of your maps are bordered with the ancient Greek equivalent of “Here be dragons,” then you can take credit for conquering the “entire world” by just knocking out the territory available in the extant cartography.

So, yeah, this is a story about Alexander the Not-Too-Shabby. It’s a legendary tale, as you’ll be able to tell by its myth-like mysticism, but I think the message works.

The story goes that the region in Greece, known as Phrygia, was without a king, and everyone knows that you have to have a king. Otherwise something something nasty brutish short something. You don’t vote for kings. Something like that. Anyway, they didn’t have a king, but they did have an oracle. The oracle had a vision that the next person to drive an ox-cart through the gates would be the new king. So, they waited and watched, and boom. A guy rolls through and everyone cheers. I can only guess how incredibly bewildering that must have been.

The guy, who is now the new king, is named Gordias, and he supposedly lived somewhere around the 2nd millennium BC, if he actually existed at all. I guess he did a good job as king. Who knows? He did have an heir though, and I guess that’s all that’s actually necessary to keep the “have a king” box checked. His son was Midas (yes, that one), who dedicated the ox-cart to Sabazios, who was apparently the local analog for Zeus. Ok, enough names.

The fun part is how the ox-cart was tied to a post. The account that I read says that Midas tied it, but it could have been Gordias or even the god Sabazios. Doesn’t matter. It’s called the Gordian Knot, and it was supposed to be impossible to untie. Roman historian and alleged Alexander fan, Quintus Curtius Rufus, claimed that this amalgamated horror of fastening exceptionalism was actually “several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened”.

Back to the oracle again. This time, the foretelling says that whoever can untie the Gordian Knot is destined to rule all of Asia. At this point, I think it’s probably wise to stop listening to fanatical lunatics who’ve been sucking on volcanic fumes, or however it is that they’re getting high out there. These idiots are handing out crowns to farmers and making plans to march to war in Asia because the cackling town drunk told them to do so, probably just before rolling around on the floor in hysterical laughter at their naivete.

Fast forward about 1500 years, and the ox-cart is somehow still there with its impossible knot. I can only presume that the ox didn’t make it. Maybe they took the ox off the cart before tying it up. Or, knowing these Phrygian weirdos, they probably just replaced the ox each time it died waiting for the conqueror to arrive and untie it. It’s not written whether the oracle was involved in this part of the prophecy, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

So, enter Alexander the Pretty Decent. As the story goes, he takes an immediate fascination with the knot. Which, of course he would — he wants to conquer everything. Might as well get some good juju on your side by way of an old magical hair tangle. He inspects the knot and, unsurprisingly, he can’t figure it out. It’s impossible to tell where one loop starts and another ends. In fact, it’s impossible to even find the ends of the knot.

Not to be deterred by this momentary setback, Alexander the Reasonably Alright decides to take a more practical approach to solving the solution. After all, the oracle didn’t specify how the knot must be undone — only that it had to be so.

Here’s where the story splits into alternate endings. One of which is something about him pulling out a lynchpin, supposed to signify how clever he was and all that. Blah, blah, Alexander the Rather Quickwitted. Sure. I prefer the other solution.

Ok, where were we… ? So, not to be deterred by this momentary setback, Alexander the Particularly Above Average decides to take a practical approach. Thus, he draws his sword and slices into the knot directly. The loops and fastenings simply fall away, the whole contrivance unraveling without the slightest problem. Bada-boom. Knot problem solved, conquering assured. Onward to Asia then.

Just as with most good myths, there are a great many different lessons and meanings one might draw here — at least as many different lessons as there are different ways of telling the story. In this case, my concern is what the knot represents, at least to me: complexity.

I wrote a couple months back about complexity, and I mentioned Joseph Tainter’s book on the collapse of complex societies. He said that civilizations, and indeed the entire enterprise that we nowadays refer to as “human civilization,” all tend to solve problems that arise by adding complexity. Every new law, every new system, every added social construct each adds complexity to the overall civilizational structure.

It’s these complexities that I read about most days in articles, news, opinion pieces, and the like. There are people advocating for transitions to different energy sources, and there are those who try to explain the difficulties and complexities inherent with such ideas. There are folks who complain about a lack of funding for this government agency or that, and then there are those who come along talking about how the government is in debt and the various complications with raising taxes versus trying to grow the economy. Some folks talk about how the red team is going to turn the world into a Christo-fascist ethno-police-state, while there are others who claim that the blue team has been steadily supporting genocide and enabling the fascists, but then they both warn about the complications involved in not voting (or voting for a different team entirely). There are economist types who say that the sky’s the limit and full steam ahead, and then there are those who foretell serious problems with debt, stagflation, and depression coming soon, each side having very strong opinions about whether the Fed should raise interest rates or lower them.

Every nation on the planet is interconnected with most every other one. Politically, of course, but also they’re tied up economically. Global corporations are linked by supply lines, trade routes, and contracts. When one does really well or crashes and burns, the rest of them feel the ripples (or the tidal waves). When one agricultural region fails to produce well, the prices go up around the entire world. People in Lebanon might starve if crops do poorly in Brazil, for example.

On and on it goes, about every topic conceivable, every commercial opportunity imaginable, and every global summit feasible. On a planet with over 8 billion humans, with most of those humans chattering their opinions into the online void (yours truly among them, of course), the level of complexity is analyzed from every possible angle. Opinions range from the reasonable to the completely unhinged, with a billion steps in between. All of those analyses are barking constantly in this cacophony of human discord.

This global, species-wide connectivity is the Civilizational Knot.

Everything humans touch, everywhere on the planet, all tied together. Every justice or injustice, every treaty or war, every donation or robbery, it’s all tied together. Any suggestion about what to do with a problem politician, any idea how to solve an issue with a foreign government or company, any notion about how to direct a group of people from this region or that state, it’s all tied together. There’s nowhere that a person can go to escape this. There’s nothing left that isn’t claimed by another human somewhere, and it’s impossible to untie.

But…

There will be no “ruler of Asia” in this case. That is to say, there will be no solutions to any of the major problems of our time. We won’t win the “battle” against climate change. There won’t be an answer to the massive wildfires, the flooding, the hurricanes, or whatever. There won’t be any fixes for the food shortages around the world. There won’t be a way to end the wars and genocide. We’re not going to end the obesity epidemic, or the mental health epidemic, or the loneliness epidemic. We aren’t going to stop the endless marketing, the commodification of every resource, or the enshittification of every product. We will never find the solution to the endless plastic. We will not ascend to a high plane of existence. We will not achieve free (too cheap to meter) energy. We’ll never pay off the national (or global) debt. We won’t be colonizing Mars, and we will never achieve interstellar travel.

Why?

Because, it’s all connected together. We can’t pull on one loop without pulling another. Hell, we can’t even find where one twist ends and another loop begins. Sure, if someone clever enough could just come along, they could untie this mess of infinite complexity, but that’s not what will happen. Tainter told us what happens to overly complex civilizations: they collapse.

Mother Nature has drawn her sword, and she’s about to cut the knot. When she does, the complexity will fall away.

We will not be doing any of the above things because there just aren’t any sufficient solutions to those interconnected difficulties. They present together as an unsolvable predicament for humanity. That isn’t to say that those difficulties won’t go away at all. They will vanish in the same way that natural living things die and decompose. They’ll be buried in the ground and reclaimed by the earth. Plastic might take a million years to degrade into useful elements again, but a million years isn’t terribly long on a cosmic scale. It will all fall away and be reborn eventually.

This is something that occupies my mind a lot these days. I think, in my weariness of civilization itself, about how much harder a life might be without the advancements and benefits offered by our society today, but also how much more energy and mental capacity I might have if I didn’t have to concern myself with the complexities of the world. When I see celebrity nonsense, political bullshittery, global warfare and even genocide, famine, or fascism — I just think about how basically none of that is going to matter someday. And, not even some far off day in the age of our great-great-great-grandkids. No, I imagine that all of this won’t even matter before I die. Maybe even before I turn 60.

Who knows?

Well, I hope you’re doing well, son. I love you very much.

Your father,

Papa Bear

[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]