Background

The current state of the world is dangerous, generating instability and widespread human suffering.

One legitimate attitude is to assume that humanity has no solution to these problems, a form of pessimistic fatalism articulated by Arthur Schopenhauer, for whom “life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom” (The World as Will and Representation, 1818).

Conversely, it is also legitimate to argue that the collective human intellect (approximately eight billion individual intelligences distributed across the Earth) should be capable of identifying ways to address the current global situation. As Baruch Spinoza argues, human reason is not external to nature but an expression of it and understanding the laws that govern reality is the first step toward acting adequately within it (Ethics, 1677).

It may be unproductive to argue indefinitely about which of these attitudes is ultimately correct, as such a debate risk becoming interminable. However, for those whose thinking aligns with Spinoza, it may become meaningful to open a dialogue about how humanity should attempt to address the present state of the world.

From this perspective, the initial task is to identify (and be able to justify) where could be found the guiding principles that must orient human behaviour.

Thesis

Human beings are a small component of a much larger system: the planetary system of Earth. In the same way, a driver is an element within a traffic system, and the liver is an organ within the human body. In certain cases, a sufficiently powerful element may modify the behaviour of the system as a whole. However, when this is not the case, the element (whether humanity, a driver, or an organ) must adapt to the governing laws of the broader system.

If an element persistently acts against the constraints of the system, systemic failure or catastrophe becomes likely. Humanity could disappear while the planet continues its evolutionary trajectory; a driver who ignores traffic signals may cause an accident, yet the traffic system itself remains intact; and if a liver disease cannot be healed, the individual organism may die while biological life as a whole persists.

The implication is clear: understanding the laws of the larger system within which humanity operates is not optional but necessary. Any sustainable model of human behaviour must be grounded in alignment with those systemic constraints rather than in opposition to them.

As Donella H. Meadows emphasizes, systems impose their own structures, feedback, and limits, and actors within them cannot sustainably act as if those constraints did not exist; effective intervention requires first understanding the behaviour of the system itself rather than focusing narrowly on the intentions of its components (Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 2008).

If we wish to proceed with this analysis, we must distance ourselves from our own human insignificance (having existed for only 0.004% of the planet’s total lifespan) and examine Earth’s behaviour from its origin to the present, seeking to identify the main evolutionary lines and determine how we must adapt to them.

The “Earth system” to which we belong, generates life, diversity, intelligence, and other emergent properties. My purpose is to debate the long-term trends of this Earth system and examine how we, the humanity, must adapt to them to avoid instability, or potentially catastrophe.