Decoding Whole Civilization Growth-to-Collapse Decoded

Greetings everyone,

I’m Jessie Lydia Henshaw, a New York senior physicist, architect & natural systems scientist, member of ISSS for decades, and long-time close observer of the amazing change-of-life our civilization is now in.

It’s become clear that for it to end well, it will need as many of us as can study, learn, and explain the truly unique global existential crisis our economy has led us into. It is even interfering with our understanding of nature and our own cultural relationships, with confusing rates and scales of change. It’s producing a dangerous loss of meaning for societal norms, environmental systems, and economic plans, a confusion we can all now see the clear fingerprints of. For the four great civilizations that ours descended from, it directly led to whole system collapse.

Technically, the cause is the compound feedback of money that has been everyone’s thrill to accelerate for so long; and now needs all of us to rise to the occasion today, and learn to tell it as a truly great story of profound change for Humanity as a whole, and, as there also is a clear escape route from the also profound collapses of our predecessors.

So, do read and think of how the world is seemingly spiraling out of control; double-check the details to filter out both what does, and does not fit the pictures of change you see in the life all around you. The story is full of familiar faces and circumstances we’ve both known forever and very new ones we’ll see differently in this new light.

The Slides: A New Language of History
The Paper: Meeting Humanity’s Greatest Challenges

Here the focus is on the leading Western Civilizations and the extraordinary challenges to their growth they failed to face as they rose from the late Stone Age, led by their recurring great creativity and collapse, as they led the creation of our modern world. In the first economic civilization, two highly creative neighboring cultures combined to face the threats of dramatic climate change: the period of the Younger Dryas.

Our story focuses on how the people of the Northern and Southern Levant regions of the Middle East were forced to change from skilled hunter-gatherers to invent new ways of living. Combining their well-matched special talents, they joined as they faced the challenge of a sharp climate change, the Younger Dryas of 12,500 to 12,500 years ago, a sudden chill that forced them to rethink.

The emerging new ways of living shared around the greater Levant began with a very long successful collaborative of creative redesign in how our their tribes lived, but failed to make the natural turn for healthy growth systems, of slowing their creativive innovation, and instead begin perfecting their new ways of living at their peaks, so… solutions keep expanding and multiplying, in confusion, ending in tumultuous collapses, followed by multi-century Dark Ages, again and again – our living history.

That was the dawn of modern civilization, a very moving story of how brilliantly they succeeded, also ending in repeated catastrophic failure, basically from not understanding how natural growth alternates between growth and maturation, and so repeatedly growing to collapse. They did it well enough, though, to creatively spread their misguided model around the world, and its consequences, for life on Earth.

That’s how modern civilization emerged; our home on Earth now in increasingly desperate straits, needing to restart something, but confused by the situation. It’s really a small error, overlooking one of nature’s most firm laws: to stop growing things and change to maturing them, in time to climax at or near its peak.

We do it all the time, too, in most things we do: start with positive feedback to grow things, then switch to negative feedback to mature and perfect them. Oh, we don’t call it by those terms. We just call it “care.”

So, this is the story of the recurrent growth and failure of our heritage to produce a stable civilization, humanity’s six main stages of growing our civilizations, one about every 2,000 years for the past 12,000 years, that all but the first failing dramatically from success, the story of:

1. The emergent northern and southern Natufian Levant cultures, as the first great organizers of their homes on earth, taking ~4,500 years of advancing shared tribal life sharing, the Northern the great stone monument and wild game herding culture at Gobekli Tepe. The southern was the perfecter of farming and accounting methods.
2. Then there was the great northern spread of that common culture to become the first managed “great world economy”: a) organizing the Fertile Crescent, b) then the Akkad and Summer regions of Mesopotamia and the collapse of its city-states, called the collapse of Babel, and c) followed a long Dark Age. They didn’t know what hit them, sort of like we don’t either.
3. The revival of a second great world growth economy, the Mediterranean Bronze Age, produced an exceptionally prosperous and creative multicultural world, much like our own in many ways: a) its tragic collapse and b) long following Dark Age
4. Then that of Classical Greece, and a) its following Dark Age
5. Then Rome, and a) its following Dark Age
6. And now what I’ll call EU/US-World, or “us” for short, the leaders of the present world growth-maximizing economy — presently destabilizing.

A quick 12,000 year primer on who we are and what we’ve been doing!

So, dear reader, the above is the introduction to my Plenary talk for the ISSS.org-2026-Annual meeting, this year in Cyprus on Thursday, June 2026. See Links Above

Please leave questions and comments below if you like. I may be slow in replying, but I hope to respond to all of interest.

Below is the first slide from the talk.

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A New Language of History
Meeting Humanity’s Greatest Challenges

AND…Tips on how vigorous growth systems turn from multiplying to conserving their designs and places in the world around them.

The Bronze Age Collapse… Spiteful Grievances and System Betrayals arise from aggressive growth and severe natural limits – creating conflict and confusion and societal loss of meaning.

Then and now!

These are seen in the abrupt, destructive collapses of the world’s first exuberant, multicultural world economy in the Bronze Age, and also seen rising around the world today, seemingly for the same reason: attempting boundless growth as natural growth limits are faced, turning the parts to both intentionally and unintentionally attack each other.

The total collapse of civilizations, particularly those at the peak of their apparent success, is inherently complex and leaves a fragmented historical record of the causes. The similarity between our own world economy’s suffering from dangerously growing internal conflict, and the apparent explanation for the collapse of the lost civilization called “Atlantis” in the Bronze Age is uncanny.

My natural systems study tools help decode stories of natural transformations, providing a good starting point for a scientifically valid study of what may have happened, and identifying, confirming, or contradicting evidence. The book “1177 BC” by E.H. Cline organizes the hard data collected in anthropological digs.

My first talk on it was on Oct 5 for the General Semantics meeting in New York. The slide set is at https://bit.ly/BronzeAgeTalk-Slides , and Slide 12 is below, marking the burned-out cities with black flames.

The first thriving multicultural world civilization was the Bronze Age “Atlantis,” centered in the Eastern Mediterranean, much like a small early version of our own. It mainly destroyed the centers of its most prosperous ~43 cities over an ~80-year period, seemingly from the inside. Curiously, however, in most cases the assailants were unknown. In the end, Atlantis seemed to simply vanish, as if its advanced languages had become meaningless.

Pirate-like “Sea People” were often depicted as the assailants, as illustrated above, but in most cases, it was unknown who was responsible, though some seemed to blame it all on them. However, there appears to have been only one confirmed battle against them, which they lost to New Egypt.

So, you can begin to see the puzzle, the odd patterns that hide an extremely important story to us, about the way of life we seem to have copied. It appears they, like we, don’t see what in the world would cause our highly successful and mature societies to somehow suddenly be overtaken by conflict and lose meaning! In my view, the overall pattern seems to tell the real story: it was resentment from the betrayal of initial hope for boundless growth, as we’ve done. That caused the economic crisis for them, as it is for us, and pushed their societies, as ours is being pushed, to lose meaning, but that didn’t get recorded, only the destruction of the cities. I arrive at that by combining the key signals of direction change recorded in the Bible for the collapse of Babel and elsewhere. See what you think, yourself.

Another link to today is the sense of betrayal felt by large subcultures in the US, which has led to sneak attacks on the institutions and workplaces of highly successful cities. It seems the only explanation for the far right and government to explain the need to destroy things to save them, central to the US government’s current economic plan, for no immediately apparent reason, except the mysterious deep animosity felt. Other than it being a “shot across the bow” or “canary in the coal mine” – a sign from nature of much deeper troubles at work, just destroying things, of course, has little benefit!

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The tried-and-true natural way out of the growth traps emerging new systems can get caught in is visible all around us, throughout the living world, and in many other kinds. It applies to human efforts, plans, and productions too. New designs generally start with a period of opportunistic connection, producing compound growth (i.e., each stage of growth accelerating the next). What resolves that is the turn to maturation, also known as “growing up.” That changes the system’s growth feedback from multiplying to caring, responding to natural signals that it’s time to make good on what’s been achieved and not risk mounting conflict as growth increasingly interferes with how other things work

If you look closely, you can find more signs of that mysterious mid-course change of direction, as a change of purpose, from faster to slower change, from extending to discovering new patterns. The need for it comes from the system’s organizational steering, its deep compass, signaling a tipping point, triggering the main change of life transformation.  Instead of multiplying growth shifts to reshaping the multiplied parts to work better together, an internal form of caring for them, like parenting, with increased patience, knitting neighbors together while adapting to and learning to engage with their new environment.

There are as many stages of gestation, in 9 months, as there are in the seven stages of growing up. For people, in 20-some years, we go from one to the next: Newborn, Infant, Child, Youth, Teen, Grad, Adult. That most fortunate of all ends of growth, new life and free agency for the new organism, the reward for finding its way. The challenge today is that our societies lost their way in life some time ago… seemingly back when people discovered how to make the period of multiplying infancy more or less permanent, forcing every age to multiply its designs ever faster.

As a result, endless growth becomes an ever more severe kind of creativity attack, blindly interfering with others’ resources and environments, which you’d mostly not see. It gives humanity its endlessly troubled world quite unintentionally. It overwhelms the relationships you need but don’t see. That is where the betrayals you don’t see coming will often come from. In “interesting times” like today, it keeps you from trusting what you see, as our words and relationships change meaning ever faster, making change hard to follow.

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The way to respond is to expand on your own better ways of sensing and responding. To get along in a world takes many kinds of sensors and an assortment of ways to respond, so one is ready when sensing to look for trouble, for example. With that work, we can navigate the weeds more effectively and engage collectively to better steer the whole, too. It’s always been how we came to peace with events and fulfilled life’s wonderful promises. But being forced to live in a world prevented from seeking peace and finding fulfillment is then a kind of betrayal.

Smashing broken things isn’t what needs attention, though. It’s finding ways to step out of the solutions that cause our problems. We might manage our savings and investments differently, tapering off compounding to see if that helps. The real benefit comes from what the profits are used for. to serve life rather than extract life, that matters, not just spending them.

It’s how the investment culture became organized around sustaining the most immature and disruptive stage of its growth, the endless doubling of its initial successful designs that becomes so creatively devastating for our societies and planet, a very odd sort of trap to be caught in!

The graceful way out of it is for the investment community to see the profit in helping things work more smoothly, looking for ways to secure or improve common systems, and to develop their operations, slower and slower on the way toward perfection. That then creates space for the more spontaneous and active engagements a society supports, adapting to and learning to work and creatively cooperate on new experiments.

The real danger is not responding to the signals of exponential reorganization, destabilizing all the systems of life and nature. Our continued rush to cash in on already profoundly broken promises is the real threat. It may not yet seem evident at this moment but just keep in mind how much has been evident about the change happening, even recently. I think it’s not exaggerating to say we’re risking our whole 10-thousand-year creative struggle to invent our own new kind of home. It could lose it all. Ouch!

That’s unfortunately clearly at risk now that we’re threatening to radically shift the eons of the evolutionary tree, perhaps leaving no calling card for ourselves behind but a gargantuan pile of trash, and to mysteriously disappear from history, as the brilliantly successful Bronze Age culture did too.

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JLH

Proposals for progressive wealth taxes to balance our growing income inequatities are popular, as discussed in the NY Times this week, by Patricia Cohen. What will actually work is to ALSO shift to profiting from the long term care of what we started on earth, rather than wreck it with growing exploitation. It’s a change of life hidden in plain sight, that PROFITING FROM GROWTH STARTS IT, BUT IT’S CARING FOR WHAT GREW THAT’S THE NATURAL LASTING SOURCE OF GOOD PROFITS.

A natural systems view of economics looks at economies as organizations of working parts that develop by growth and then transform to fit into the workings of their environments, — or not. Our world economy developed to work by growing as a whole. over centuries, as our own bodies also did in the womb, over several months… an extended period of self-animated formative working design.

The catch is that the economy was also designed to, in effect, never be born, but just multiply ever more dramatically in the womb of nature, forever. Yes, that is indeed not working out for us (again), as it often has not for others in the near and distant past. The problem arises from starting economies the way nature starts *all* new lives, with a long period of using things that work to multiply the work they do, as in business done by reinvesting the profit.

Why people become so very misled by that long exerience of achieving the impossible is the real issue, and a more complex story, too. We basically become fixated on it. What we can clearly see now is that our own growth drivien economy is creating at least three major kinds of potentially fatal inequities that are growing ever faster, and distributing wealth really needs to come chanting its purpose, too, repurposing it as in natural growth, from profiting from exploitation to profiting from good care :

ESCALATING INEQUITY #1. In the figure below you can see that low middle and high income household incomes increased in proportion to each other. However as economies face natural limits the more powerful can take more of the profits. That could be balanced with redistribution, but as we see today, there already is considerable redistrabution and inequality is increasing faster than ever.

ESCALATING INEQUITY #2 is that the economy is designed to push the limits of the earth, maximizing the economy’s profits by maximizing its endless compound growth of exploiting the earth, societies, and people, inequitably undermining their health and ability to support the economy— that threatens the whole system and would cause both physical and financial collapses if taken to its limits.

ESCALATING INEQUITY #3 a great accelerator of the first two, that kicked in 1970. What happened is the rules were changed, in effect transfering the ownership of business to shareholders, thinking that would make finance and business more profitable, which it certainly did. It also made the whole world explosively more inequitable:

    a) their exploitation of the economy and nature by putting money in and then taking more out,

    b) without caring for the health of the economy, so instead driving it to collapse.

The new rules came from the “Chicago school” of economics persuading the SEC to change the rules. That sounds crazy, but it was intended to consolidate the multiplicity of stock markets into one, make the market more open to the public, and to be easier to use. Of course it unleashed a gambling heaven, driving disruptive competition, and shortchanign good care, to sacrificing the rest of the economy to making bets on putting money in to take ever more out. And it worked fabulously. 

EXCEPT  — What went wrong was the neglected effect on the economy’s main resources, people, and nature. With shareholders acting as the owners of the economy, they used their ownership to control all the jobs, maximizing their growing profits while degrading their resources as quickly as possible. This had made them blind to the economy’s supports. That’s how we got to today, with our pushing unprotected systems to their breaking points — AND PUSHING THE WHOLE SYSTEM TOWARD FINANCIAL AND MATERIAL FAILURE, already progressing rapidly as we see around us today.

That most people become fixated on one thing then another, may be why, miraculously, no one seemed to notice what a suicidal design the economy had developed. It worked so well that it now threatens its own collapse, likely to be long-lasting, as it rapidly undermines the economy’s natural foundations for recovery.

However — THERE’S A TRIED-AND-TRUE KIND OF ESCAPE —

From surveying nature, it becomes apparent that all new systems start with dead-end growth plans. It is what NATURE ALWAYS DOES to complete the huge task of getting things started from next to nothing. So, nature also developed a simple but essential trick for changing directions to protect its new systems from the real danger of overshoot. That sounds vaguely familiar I hope, as it’s also what people do to get anything started, too.

To survive, every natural growth system has to:

REDIRECT ITS PROFITS FROM MULTIPLYING TO PERFECTING ITS DESIGNS.

That is THE NATURAL WAY for new lives to achieve long-lasting and healthy survival, distributing its profits for perfecting its design. It’s such a surprising and abrupt reversal of purposes, and in most cases, it happens so smoothly and quickly that people haven’t noticed what a brilliant survival tactic it really is.

The switch from getting things started to finishing them is achieved by refining their designs, as people do with anything they successfully begin and complete. For designs to work, the finishing stage is also about perfecting their surrounding relations, much like finishing a house by painting it and then inviting new friends to a party.

So… the truth is our whole world should do what nature very clearly says is the most freeing, profitable, and satisfying natural transformation for dead-end growth systems, making the turn to growing up to finish the job and enjoy successful new lives.

We all know that life is not as simple as it looks from afar; it always takes a little struggle to get things going. However, doing things to grow up right is generally the best thing that ever happens in new lives, allowing them to survive long-term, have rich experiences, and thrive.

Well… that’s my view, anyway. There’ll be lots of questions, but mainly, it’s looking around to see how the real-world works will help the most, feeling your own way around the issues, and talking with friends.

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Jessie Lydia Henshaw

Nov 6, 2025

First sent to the UN [Civil Society FfD List]

Yvonne & All,

Diagnosing our ongoing world civilization change is becoming more possible as what’s happening is more graphically displayed, but still very counter-intuitive. Our whole human and natural worlds are changing systems.

The main driver, obvious to many, is our old civilization’s world committment to push its economic growth as if to infinity, which is of course self-destabilizing at the limit. So… while the principles of the NGOs are still valid, such as trying to support the disadvantaged countries and seeking more equitable global governance, the general upset of the world systems we once knew is now an added challenge. 

The nearly universal mental block we’re struggleing with is that of trying to stabilize economic growth, despite growth being inherently an ever more destabilizing process at the limit. Growth is a whole system process of working parts using profits to multiply their workings… Perhaps you can instantly sense the various strange places that might go?

Growth is a kind of pregnancy for any system, a natural part of both its desirability and great danger, that humans have been very confused by for millennia, 10 milennia, actually, since people in the Middle East it seems discovered that the planting of seeds can be organized to multiply both plants and more seeds, the secret of economic growth. Boy! has that ever caused trouble along with surprising riches.

So, having misunderstood what growth is for such a long time, we now need to understand that our many current fast growing global perils are coming from the false hope of making growth last, rather than choosing to guide its transformation. Growth naturally can never last, but as we experience in our personal lives, growth at any scale may transform to wonderfully advance the wealth of new life.

However, the opposite is true too, as we well know, growth can end in quite unexpected great tragedy. For growth climaxing in the birth of individual new lives there are many hazards we all know, and the one great hazzard our world is facing would just never occur, modern civilizations so vigorous effort to keep growing in nature’s very finite womb, as if to attempt to never be born.

What’s happening, instead of economic growth producing a healthy live birth, we’re seeing the opposite, civilization climaxing in dysfuncion, as history shows has happened at a grand scale least three times before, leading to long “Dark Ages,” that all but completely erase the cultures that were at first seeking fulfillment. We could take it “as a sign,” to do the right things, change course to maturing the new world we’ve been making rather than driving it to collapse, yet again.

All living systems appear especially prone to produces one or another kind of “panic attack” when pushed too far, directly associated with the cohesion of the organisms from which they get their ability to behave as a whole. So, being able to feel threats to that cohesion coming is essential to survival, a matter for most living systems of “reading the field” for signs of danger.

When that fails, the most dangerous of familiar panics we’re not seeing emerge, is how people turn to just smashing things. We now see that in the general societal panic occurring in the US, with energized mass movements literally seeking to destroying democracy to save it. That is one of the preciously important clues to the derangement of the originally good intent. Anoter side of that is how it’s such a very uncristial thing to do and centered in devoutly Christian communities. They’re not evil so much as just gravely mistaken.

That’s because panics are, of course, both quite intentional and uncontrollably inadvertent, one of the great hazards of trying to protect systems working as a whole under strains that cause them to panic, a universal frailty of all human minds at least. So… to escape it one needs to learn how to read it, noticing emerging disjointed responses to the strains of as yet boundless growth as clues to what is causing them. It’s a common art of perception we need to reinforce rapidly now that global dysfunction and panic appear on a long term rise.

Passover is another of those disjointed indelible tales of people pushed to their very limits becoming inexplicably destructive. As clear as it is, we didn’t get the clue, though. Historically that story seems to come from the similar, extraordinarily self-destructive Bronze Age collapse, that erased our first exuberant multicultural world economy. So, that may be why we didn’t get the message, seeking infinity is a real threat.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age# 2) https://bit.ly/SpitefulGrievance-LikeTrumps-CausedBronzeAgeCollapse

The parallels to today’s smash everything cultures are everywhere, some claiming to be saving societal structures. These are what one should study as “canaries in the coal mine” or “leaks in the dike” as read in the many classic stories of grave hidden danger to be quickly averted.

The irony is that almost everyone develops skill in using the magic of natural growth, taking the little explosions of creative genius we collect as jewels of personal achievement to add to our chains. It’s that same creative thrill that gets us in the worst of trouble, too, distracting us enough from the small voices, to not see them becoming a “disturbance in the force” rather than a blessing, almost guaranteed if pushed too far. 

The force of finance, using profit to multiply profit starts as wonderful creativity, too, but then quickly becomes societally suicidal, crossing the limits of its surroundings, their worlds of sustaining contextual systems and essential capacities of nature. All may then get pushed to their natural limits of torment and disfunction.    Oops… that’s too far!

So, the point is to use all those observations of the life within and around us for steering along our pathways to fulfillment, discovering what we can make of our own magical places and times, making lives to enjoy… preferably not to be tormented by. It’s often quite a challenge, especially now, as we all face the result of the leading Western cultures’ nominally 10,000 year quest for infinite power over each other and nature, fooled again and again, blinded by the abstractions seeming to be the realities.

So, today there seems very little time for us to globally change direction to avoid adding our greatest ever planetary living system collapse to our list of accomplishments! That would be too bad, indeed. 

The way not to is to learn how to steer, rather than just run into ever bigger trouble and hope something survives.. One way can start with just briefly stopping in one’s track, as you read this, to consider where to better to go, and make a turn in that direction!

Jessie Lydia

It seems our natural confusion about nature is quite natural. We are part of nature, but we behave so differently, seem so powerful and talented, yet have kept making huge mistakes throughout history. Is there a way for us to live “normally” and not keep having to make such lasting trouble for ourselves?

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One of the noticeable common patterns in both human and natural behavior can help us see the hand of nature, or God, if you prefer. Both our bodily and mental behaviors are energy processes, and in one important way, like all observable behaviors, they are alike in how they begin and end

Their changes all begin and end with long or short chains of “emergence and convergence,” as local system “startup and finish-up” processes develop and subside, allowing nature to build up and taper off its energy system designs. They’re necessary for nature, including for our bodies and minds, but may only be visible from the pervasive, smoothly connecting S-curves of change that are found everywhere in nature.

1. S-curves of Change, periods of emergence and convergence: All observable events begin with a period of cumulative compound growth, simply because nothing can start from its top rate of change, but has to start slow and build up.

Those common features are parts of the solution. The great problem facing humanity is that as we separated ourselves from our animal experience, we also lost much of our once considerable ability to intuitively read what was happening around us, from our senses responding to the changing directions of these natural curves; symbolized above.

We still feel the sharpness of movements when traveling, sometimes signaling emergency needs for preparations or, the opposite, “that everything can relax.” We have thousands of words to describe these informative connections with the natural streams of information from the behaviors of the world around us. What would you do, for example, if great nations suddenly and rather wildly began heading off in unexplored directions?

It could happen, and it just did!! So, for as long as one can keep close to things that will still matter, the continuity of life and our connections with each other will be maintained. We also lose connection with how our world is responding to us by “making up stuff” about what’s happening, in place of “observing and feeling stuff.”

It seems not too hard to reeducate one’s bodily feelings that would normally respond to environmental signals of change, like feeling a hesitation is someone’s response to you, sometimes good to verify, sometimes better not to. It’s this way of being alert to what’s happening in a way that revives our original way of feeling our way along, reading the world as in step with our understandings, that will be key to successfully restoring a little comfortable order to the Earth again.om how they push one way or another, feeling comfortable or increasingly uncomfortable as “signals” from nature we feel in our guts.

What seems to have created a deep deception for us is that we started making up our own realities… rather than learning how falsely simplify our view of nature, we have generally represented those creative periods with equations, **erasing** evidence of their emerging processes and the contexts they emerge in, permanently blinding people to the organizational complexity of how nature works!

In effect, that choice represented all of nature with business models for how to interfere with nature for profit or to “buy low and sell high” in the business world.

The turning point in the history of mankind’s struggle with our own false self-importance –the only way to put it – came during the recovery of civilization, ~600 years after the Bronze Age Mediterranean civilization’s collapse from it. It was the emergence of science, from the great innovations offered by Thales, that formalized what we call “the growth to collapse model” for very creative, yet certain, civilization development to self-destruction.

It’s only a fairly firm research opinion, but science may have developed by combining the creativity of two earlier groups of Mediterranean cultures, group A) the marvelous design abilities of earlier Egyptian, Cretan, and Greek cultures, and group B) the Babylonian and Hebrew cultures that focus on abstraction and absolutes, providing the mathematical foundation for sysematicly empowering group A. That, unfortunately, also organizes modern civilization science designed around a business model for endlessly multiplying its power. Anyone could see it would not last, but for self-important people, it is often too captivating to resist.

The fatal flaw would not be noticed for a long time, as the highly profitable but faulty change in Mediterranean societal leadership from connecting group A design cultures focused on natural designs (which give warnings of destabilizing limits) and Group B cultures from the more unforgiving Fertile Crescent and Middle East, focusing on statistical rules that easily project to infinity, which tied to even forgiving natural environments will fail before the get there.

What caused the amazing productivity of these partnerships to end in utter disaster was probably discovered by many, but was put down again and again as social forces, as they so often do, for lack of explanations, and disoriented by their proven formulas for success terribly failing again and again, blind to the role of contexts.

Even today, society’s commitment to maximizing growth **without concern that the growing instability of ever more sudden change** (the actual symptom we’re experiencing that we feel as being jerked round) may not have a good chance of settling down as our growth systems turn to relieving strains and perfecting their designs, on the path to surviving our period of ever faster growth.

So,1) given humanity’s often misleading feelings of self-importance and 2) our deeply entrenched cultures committed to growth, we could collectively see the advantages of finding how to care for what we made, or keep bickering.

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JLH 2025-06-10

While there are an amazing variety of answers to that today, the one I gravitate to is that the question is very meaningful to everyone. We all have a clear understanding of what the words “happen” and “happening” mean. We know they have to do with the changing “organization” of things that “matter” to us. Some may not realize it, but there are no comparable scientific definitions for those deeply meaningful parts of life.

You could ask your favorite web chat sites, TwitterX or Bluesky , your search sites, like Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, Yahoo, Internet Archive or your AI wizards like Gemini, ChatGPT, or knowledge bases. Try asking a) or b):

a) The most serious issue: “How can our world escape the apparent doom cycle we’re in of ever-escalating mistakes and tragedy, destabilizing our societies and the whole living environment.”

b) The more open:
“What is really happening to us?”

In your search, are you finding anything about what’s happening to us as occurring naturally or happening to all other kinds of growth systems, too? The truth is people all naturally know a WHOLE lot about “what’s happening” that science is unable to detect or describe, as happening is natural.

There is a simple scientific reason. It’s that human knowledge develops from experience in the living contests of growth and change as part of nature. Science searches for perpetual and unchanging truths that can be stripped of context in order to define answers with measurable, absolute certainty.

Life is lively, though, and nature created organisms to become highly skilled in negotiating the often rapidly changing worlds around them. So humans are quite an exception in finding ourselves unable to respond to growing crises like climate change, economic overshoot, societal conflict, and ecological catastrophe.

What I use is a practice anyone can use to improve their observations of what’s happening and find where the changes come from. It starts with learning to *feel the rates of change.* It’s very often what we react to, something coming on slowly, quickly, or suddenly. It may be feeling it in your gut, in your throat, in your eyes, or in other ways, sensing a need to respond to signals of change in relationships that matter.

With practice, one can learn to mentally trace those feelings to the specific things one is responding to well enough to tell what else is connected. The rates of change are key. They tell you whether it’s a 1) steady change, 2) accelerating, 3) a growing system, or a 4) fluctuating pattern.

Those shapes of change over time can be used to find and connect with other parts of it since **change is a system, and all its linked parts tend to move together** as for economic growth, as shown below. Notice how constant the growth rates are. They trace nature’s most radical process of developing new systems, which may then tear them apart. So.. “Good question.”

The general shape of all these stable concentric curves (having the same exponential origin) is that some of the subsystems are changing slower, but they’re all changing at what has become an explosive rate relative to what’s manageable on Earth, rearranging the earth ever faster than anyone thought possible. That appears to be why we don’t know what to do.

So, my casual research practice (before a long-term study, perhaps) starts with noticing something and seeing what’s happening around it. That’s how you find what’s moving in the same way, implying the organization of the system connects them. That’s very helpful, as with personal relationships, so that you can find and respond to the right things.

Societal relationships show similar diverging coupled rates of change as the economy. With societal changes, we are much more aware of the resulting disruptive crises of conflict in relationships, as those are where we live our lives. The reason is that change in everything is being accelerated to its limits of breakdown or misbehavior. It pushes every system to the threshold of it breaking apart. Yikes…

As these changes are at different paces and raising different unfamiliar complications for everyone, we even find the people pushing this endless radical rearrangement of the world (mostly using the financial system) being quite blind to their contexts and the fragility of living systems pushed to reorganize ever faster.

From my long-term studies of it, all of what’s happening to us is ‘natural’, if also rather negligent given the failure to successfully respond. Growth is a system of compound accelerating change that invariably creates a crisis for itself. You might say nature uses it for blowing up new designs for life to see if they’ll respond by stabilizing their designs before growth rips them apart, or not.

Some growth systems tip from multiplying to unifying and maturing very early in their growth – to have a long rich life… and others tip rather late on miss that turn all together, breaking up their relationships. It’s nature’s test for living systems, choosing between emerging lives growing up and falling apart, for life, a choice.

Not noticing this quite pervasive pattern, I think, is why the modern world missed how dramatically climate change would intrude on our lives, leaving us now without a real clue as to what to do about it. I’ve been studying that kind of mysterious discrepancy between native and scientific languages for some time. Native languages have all kinds of ways to alert people to unstable change, but as that comes from feeling what’s happening, science, business, finance, government, the academy, all can’t translate it into what to do. In this case the main flaw in science causing it to not know what to do seems to be it had no practice of surveying what is going on in the contexts of the rules science and economics use, completely blind to the natural relationships the resulting activity of using the profitable rules to steer the planet.

That we’re all in this together is still the great observation.

It lets you realize that what just happened to politics in the US and around the world is part of a common struggle to hold societies together, pushed to the dangerous limit of seeing no way forward than – by breaking things. The desperate actors apparently do not realize it’s all our also common efforts to seek ever faster change (by compound investment multiplying solutions and then hidden problems they create) that’s the principle source of all great threats.

Jan 2, 2025

The rest of the article is on my research site as Whats-really-happening-to-us Below is a list of the related research reports I chose to give http://bit.ly links to:

1. A Clear Natural Signal for Moving Investment to Whole System Care
   Bit.ly/WarningGrowthOfSocietalDesperation
2. Top 100 World Crises Growing with growth
   https://synapse9.com/_r3ref/100CrisesTable.pdf
   or https://bit.ly/TopCrises
3. 2011 paper Whole systems energy assessment.
   https://bit.ly/WholeSystemImpactAssessment
4. Warning Growth Of Societal Desperation
   https://bit.ly/WarningGrowthOfSocietalDesperatio
   https://bit.ly/WarningOfGrowingDesperation
   
5. Elected under false pretenses 
   https://bit.ly/ElectedUnderFalsePretenses
6. Cults that threaten
   https://bit.ly/CultsThreatenThoseBlindToThem
7. Etymology of ‘Cult’
   https://bit.ly/EtymologyOfCult
8. Google Ngram of cult emergence
   https://bit.ly/GoogleNgramOfChristNatEmergence
9. What cult are we
   https://bit.ly/WhatCultWeDo
10. The genome of language
    https://bit.ly/GenomeOfOurLanguage
11. Three Civ’s down one to go
    https://bit.ly/4g7TC52
12. LinkedIn – Words linking (&separating) minds and nature
    https://bit.ly/3SygvV8
13. LinkedIn – a rather strange feeling
    https://bit.ly/4f9LIYt
14. LinkedIn –  Whoa there!
    https://bit.ly/3ztQtfc
15. JLH ISSS wiki
    https://bit.ly/3WcWaqM
16. LinkedIn – Are we blinded buy search for theory?
    https://bit.ly/3Vo8KBP
17. Keynes’ Ch 16, on the limits of growth and what to do
    https://bit.ly/4bBdquV
18. Post growth plans need nature’s way of getting there
    https://bit.ly/4bxRCAf
19. Markus Feldthus on Post Growth Plans
    https://bit.ly/44VNojB
20. Post Growth Needs Nature’s Plan
    https://bit.ly/3WPf2Nf
21. Three steps higher to real sustainability
    https://bit.ly/44MaLvK
22. A long chain of collapse
    https://bit.ly/3ylTBJu
23. Growth constant fingerprints of 1780
    https://bit.ly/3JmQFi4
24. AMOC Oceanography
    https://bit.ly/3xve0v1
25. Changes that work &what we miss
    https://bit.ly/4318nR2
26. LinkedIn – Cautiously watch signs of collapse
    https://bit.ly/3SYk46z
27. 2023 ISSS – System self-organization &  self-control
    https://bit.ly/3UZpqRx
28. Feb 2024 World change slides
    https://bit.ly/3TgkhDc
29. Donate JLH
    https://bit.ly/49EUwCg
30. Fall of Rome search
    https://bit.ly/48vg9nr
31. Greek Dark Age search (Atlantis)
    https://bit.ly/3TffZwc
32. Dark Ages Search
    https://bit.ly/3OVuUZz
33. LinkedIn- Might AI effect RI (real intelligence)
    https://bit.ly/49jg5YW
34. LinkedIn – nature heals
    https://bit.ly/42eSqq0
35. Scripps CO2
    https://bit.ly/4aF0fci
36. LinkedIn – How systems steer
    https://bit.ly/3RJHFqZ
37. YouTube – Blindness to things that matter
    https://bit.ly/3trJnok
38. YouTube – What observation naturally cannot see
    https://bit.ly/3JpdzFV
39. Notes on context blindness
    https://bit.ly/3NpBWpl

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02 JUNE 2023