Ecosustem
A Spark In The Dark Forest
Darkness
Dear reader, I have a question for you. Have you ever closed the door to a stairway at night, with some sense this made you safer? Perhaps you lived or stayed in a two-story building and headed down late at night for a treat, or perhaps you were left home alone and were just heading off to bed? Either way, why is it you felt safer closing that door? If a robber got in, they surely would not be stopped by an interior door - one without locks, I imagine? Perhaps you felt safer because you’d hear it open if someone, or something, was down there? Curiously, shrinking the inhabited space to what is known, and sealing off what is unknown, made you feel safer even if in reality no practical safety advantage was gained.
Whether you realized it or not, you participated in a Chain of Suspicion, or an economy where you traded an uncontrollable unknown for a more controllable known - an Ecosustem, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Whereas creatures in any ecosystems out your window compete for breeding rights and food to continue their lineages, creatures in an ecosustem compete in similar fashion for survival, only by means of having information and control. Such a model has ancient parallels too, showing up in the Bible in the form of Daniel’s prophetic beasts. These beasts represent nations rising out of the “Sea of Gentiles”, battling each other for dominance. These beasts are often amalgamations of various animals which represent ethnic tribes, because most empires formed from the consolidation of said tribes. But be weary of assuming these are fixed categories. Daniel’s beasts could pull apart their limbs and stick them onto each other, but their parts could also morph if that particular tribe changed. Horns emerge, or fall off. Far from literal beasts, they are contained political cosmologies. There is the formal beast you see, and the spiritual beast you cannot which is a collection of niches to which the parts can conform, or deform, interchangeably. The head of a lion could just as easily deform into a house cat, leaving the beast in question far weaker than it started. But more on that in a bit.
For now, let’s interrogate this instinct to shrink a space for safety. Do you suppose it may be a scaleless behavior? By that I mean: does this behavior extend beyond your home? I imagine you have felt this same sensation when you entered an unsafe neighborhood and felt either fear or resentment. Perhaps you found people from that neighborhood in your own and you had some fleeting dreams of moving to a safer place. You want some buffer, no doubt.
Did you ever feel that way to a nation? Perhaps like Iraq, or Russia, depending on your political propaganda? I’d say it sounds like this behavior goes beyond your own house. From the Baghdad green zone, to ancient city walls, to simply rolling a boulder to block off parts of a cave from lions, tigers, and bears, this behavior appears both scaleless, and timeless. Complex entities grow until they reach limits, they experience some kind of stress that makes them worry about continuing to exist in those limits, and then they enter a phased reduction until they find a comfort zone - or occasionally, they just keep decaying until they collapse.
This article is about that instinct, and the ecosustem it generates, as well as what we can learn from it.
Forests
If you’ve been following this substack for a while, you know I’ve written about the Dark Forest concept a number of times, with focus on the Chain of Suspicion. If you’re new, here’s a brief primer:
The concept of the Dark Forest started its development from David Brin’s 1983 critique of the Fermi Paradox, concluding that the reason the cosmos looks empty is because nature selects for silence. He speculated that the universe is full of “hunters”, who actively destroy civilizations that make themselves known to the cosmos. Reason being, the vast time scales between discovery and first contact almost certainly denies any hope of technological parity. Rather than risk being out-competed, advanced civilizations quickly snuff out any competition while they’re still in the celestial womb. As such, nature selects for greedy civilizations that shoot first. 1995’s The Killing Star would explore this hunter concept further, but Liu Cixin's Three Body Trilogy would formally coin the term “Dark Forest” for the state of the cosmos under this reign of terror.
The modus operadi of the Dark Forest - what makes it a plausible model that would reward civilizations with survival - is the “Chain of Suspicion”, or the inability to clearly and quickly communicate between worlds. At the planetary scale, this block in communication can be due to cultural and linguistic differences, and a refusal to mediate them. At the galactic scale, the speed of light and the vast distances between civilizations ensures that communication at even bare minimum levels takes generations to accomplish. It’s simply safer to send a bomb than a greeting.
Considering the distances of far away worlds, and the centuries it would take to communicate, how can any meaningful dialogue occur? You could have a Roman in Gaul say hello, and by the time there’s a reply, a Frenchman would be listening instead. Communication becomes a strange game where the ears and mouths of participants are constantly being replaced by new regimes and religions over such time spans that there would be virtually no linguistic or ideological consistency. Without consistency of dialogue, what remains consistent is suspicion. Far from a marketplace of ideas, the universe becomes an economy of suspicions, or an Ecosustem. And just as your childhood self could not easily determine if the boogeyman was friendly or not - stirring you to run up the stairs - so too is it impossible to quickly determine if little green men are your friends or enemies. So best to hide - or if you’re found, to shoot first.
At the planetary scale, these limits in communication are far easier to rectify. Have you ever sat down and mapped out how many times that big red phone on the president’s desk - a direct line of communication between Moscow and Washington - has prevented global catastrophe? Too many, I can tell you. Here on Earth, starting a chain of suspicion is always a choice, not a hard default at the galactic level. But in either case, if communication never occurs - or takes too long - it is inevitable that one or the other will preemptively strike for self-preservation’s sake. It is this insurmountable chain of suspicion that makes the forest dark. The inevitable “Dark Forest Strike” to remove suspicion would be visible to anyone watching, and be a self-reinforcing pressure to close the door and run under the covers.
In this Ecosustem two main traits are selected for survival: paranoia, and camouflage. Paranoia gets selected as a winning trait if a player’s response to a greeting is a gunshot, as they will win every time. Camouflage gets selected because those that never say hello in the first place never get shot. Over time, the only players left are the ones that shoot first, and the ones that never say hello. There is a slither of room left for a third type of civilization as well, rare as it is: any intelligence sufficient enough to figure this out before they go out into space will have to specialize in the trait of patience. But, such a civilization may very well hold the tinder that can burn the whole forest down.
One hopes this is us.
Fire
Good reader, now that you have a rough sketch of this Dark Forest, understand that I believe we very much live in one on this planet. Any thought which signals itself from outside the current world order gets snuffed out, corrupted, subverted, or integrated before it’s even formalized. Issues get sliced and diced into 50/50 splits for or against, and mainline parties bid on which they will take without much consistency. If anything cannot be bid on, it is destroyed. To such a brutality are these strikes in the Dark Forest, that you can see how many have chosen silence over broadcast, least the hunters catch them. With voting rates as low as 30% some years, and as high as 70% other years, it’s safe to say huge swaths of the public opt to hide and only come out if they feel they can get something out of it, no matter who is running. People no longer (did they ever?) care if a candidate is a communist or capitalist. They care if someone will provide them something. For this they may exchange a vote for not closing the door and running under the sheets.
At this junction, I wish to bring to your attention an old forest Druid who stalks its shady groves, nestled away in the Cthulhuian coasts of Connecticut. John Michael Greer is something of a foil to current thing™ politics, controversial both in academia where he has some authority in the sociology field, and in esoteric conspiratoria where he has a small cult following as the current head of the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America - yes, you read that correctly. Greer offers a question to the Dark Forest model: Can the forest burn down?
I plan to write more on Greer’s esoterica, but for this piece I’ll be focusing on his theories related to a Dark Forest fire, or what he calls Catabolic Collapse. The model is interesting primarily because it is not a model of sudden collapse. Rather, it posits that posits collapse can be so slow that people just ignore it. It's so slow that every generation sets their standards a bit lower without even noticing it, until you're voting for someone promising regulations on billionaires while you go home to a goat herder house erected over some derelict former skyscraper. A quick review can be found over at Keith Wood’s channel if you’d like to familiarize yourself first:
Greer’s Druidic conjurations on the health of the Dark Forest comes from his assertion that what we live in a rather poor shadow of Plato’s Republic - perhaps as seen from Plato’s Cave. I will take a page out of his 2019 article The Dream of a Managed Society, with the important note that this is a pre-pandemic work.
To Plato, as to plenty of other intellectuals then and later, there was a strict hierarchy among these parts, with epithumia on the lowest level, thumos above that, and nous above all. What he did in crafting the utopia of The Republic—and what plenty of other people have done since his time—was to turn this into a social hierarchy. The equivalent of epithumia was the working class; the equivalent of thumos was a class of guardians, armed warrior-policemen whose job it was to maintain social order and defend the Republic against all enemies internal and external; the equivalent of nous, of course, was an elite class of philosopher-kings who had received a thorough education to fit them for their roles as the governing caste.
The problem is quite simple. Let’s start by granting that every human being is composed, as Plato suggests, of epithumia, thumos, and nous. If that’s the case, then it won’t work to assign any one of these to a social class, because every member of that class has all three, just as they all have heads, chests, and bellies. The working classes aren’t just epithumia; they also have their thumos—their pride, their self-respect, and their capacity for violence—and their nous—their capacity to think, and in particular to wonder whether the laws proclaimed by the philosopher-kings are actually wise commandments or are simply another helping of self-serving cant.
The same thing is true, crucially, on the other end of Plato’s totem pole. The philosopher-kings aren’t simply bubbles of nous contemplating truth. Plato offered a scheme for getting them to behave as such—basically, giving them a philosophical education—and that was an interesting hypothesis when it was originally proposed. It’s hard to think of a hypothesis that’s been more thoroughly tested over the last 2300 years, though, and the verdict is in: it doesn’t work.
Dear reader, recognize that attempting a rigid hierarchy of humanity will fail on a long enough time span due to the problems Greer outlined. That isn’t to say hierarchies and castes are impossible or impracticable, only that there needs be flexibility for when random combinations of genes and experiences produce an elevated, or deflated, character. The realities of nature can only tolerate so many inter-caste bastards before there exists a cabal of the uppers self-conscious of their collective incapacity to match their fore-bearers, and a brotherhood of lowers all too aware that they are the ascendant. Because everyone possesses these same humors that Plato outlined, a rigid hierarchy can quickly generate a Dark Forest state as these rigid castes face growing costs to maintain themselves. Trust breaks down, and to some extent one might compare this to Machiavelli’s lions and foxes. Elites on the decline exhibit fox-like behavior, avoiding and setting traps against competition, while the rising lower caste’s warriors exhibit lion-like behavior, fighting and presenting strength. Neema Parvini’s The Populist Delusion underscores this nature. If you’d like to get a quick overview of such matters, give it a read.
For my purposes, I am going to equate this decay of trust to the aforementioned Chain of Suspicion. Rigid hierarchies, over time, consume the trust that produced them and produce excitement of the humors in the wrong category. The upper caste shoos away criticism of their declining character, seeking instead to reinforce historic boundaries. It is inevitable that its rigidity eventually hits a breaking point, in which a lion avoids the traps and manages to grab a bite at the fox. A counter-blow follows to enforce the hierarchy, and both discover that Dejure is not aligned with Defacto. This misalignment is a sign of rot, and once it's seen it can oft signal a change is coming.
Here, caution is advised not to assume this blow represents a single be-all and end-all close to a civilization’s history. Rather, it represents only the beginning of an active engagement to test the hierarchy, trending towards collapse - one which often has a brief consolidation period once the weakness is exposed. We saw something like that recently with the pull out of Afghanistan followed by the surprisingly effective US-funded resistance in Ukraine. But consolidation behavior ought not be confused with renewed strength. No one is actually producing more strength, they are merely reorganizing to seem strong. They are a civilizational equivalent to a fear response - the puffing up of fur and feather.
For this model, let us presume the caste and hierarchy is akin to a niche in the ecosystem, or as we are now calling it the ecosustem in this context. But, to repeat Greer’s critique, these roles in the Dark Forest - lions, foxes, and more, oh my - are not fixed, but rather averages. All members of the human species, and the complex societies they build, contain all the humors Plato outlined, only in different proportion. One niche may have fewer lions than foxes, but they do not lack lions. Another caste may be nearly entirely lions, but only one fox’s trap can ruin the pride. Be aware how this model works, and recognize the niche exists regardless of it having an occupant.
Pause here, dear reader, and consider the following. What happens to a niche of, say, apex predator when all the lion degenerate into house cats? Does the position of apex predator cease to exist? No, it persists whether or not a creature exists to fill the role. This is an important extraction from Greer, though I’ve been aware of it since before I’ve read him and I will write more about another time. The lesson here is that these niches continue to exist regardless of anything playing their role. That means, dear reader, that the niche transcends the chaos of degenerating or regenerating species, imposing order onto the seeming randomness of genes and learned behaviors. This applies to the abstract ecosustem of beasts representing nations, to actual ecosystems in the wild. This is why the model holds well over time: no matter how many times things collapse, the same roles re-emerge when the ecosystem heals - because the same forces shaping the ecosystem remain. There will always be an apex hunter, there will always be a decomposer, there will always be a prey herd animal. Far from blind emergent characteristics, there are designed forces shaping life to always return to this ideal form, and at least for me they suggest a created order that has been imposed on us since the universe began.
This has far-reaching consequences. It means that any utopia which denies or obstructs this natural hierarchy will inevitably depart from reality and degenerate into a collapse. Pure consumer capitalism? This denies the role of the priest, and so the priesthood will re-emerge one way or another, even if it is such a degenerated form such as an HR department. Brutal communism? This denies the role of the nobility, and nobility will re-emerge one way or another, even in such a degenerated form as the Presidium of the Soviet Union. Or as Stalin described it when he formed it:
According to the system of our Constitution, there must not be an individual President in the U.S.S.R., elected by the whole population on a par with the Supreme Soviet and able to put himself in opposition to the Supreme Soviet. The President of the U.S.S.R. is a collegium, it is the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, including the President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, elected, not by the whole population but by the Supreme Soviet and accountable to the Supreme Soviet. Historical experience shows that such a structure of the supreme bodies is the most democratic and safeguards the country against undesirable contingencies
A lot of words for what amounts to a House of Lords. The roles in a society continue with or without a civilization to fill them. Father, mother, the local butcher, the honest farmer, the nerdy teacher, the mystic prophet, the literate priest, etc etc - these roles are hard-coded onto the cosmos and will reemerge, one way or another.
Greer has more to say about this behavioral pattern. Let’s expand on it.
Math
In 2005, Greer published a scientific paper titled How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. In it, Greer draws from his Druidic ecological model and introduces the relationship between Catabolism (Breaking down complex systems) and Anabolism (Building up towards more complex systems) as a cyclical model for the rise and fall of complex societies. It’s a great form of philosophical biomimicry which the Dark Forest model can be developed with. By documenting the forces shaping hierarchy, rather than defining a rigid hierarchy, Greer shows that a defacto hierarchy will eventually trump a dejure one. If this distance grows past a point of no return, the Dark Forest burns down entirely. But, this in turn would allow for a new hierarchy to emerge.
In Greer’s model, the forces that shape niches in the Dark Forest are outlined as such:
(R) Resource: Simpler things systems consume to build complexity
(P) Production: Complex things systems produce from consumed simper things
(C) Capital: Incorporated complexity that has further use.
(W) Waste: Incorporated complexity that has no further use.
(M) Maintenance: The use of C & P to sustain C & P
These forces keep the Anabolic / Catabolic engine swaying back and forth as a form of stability. Greer gives a simple equation to describe equilibrium, which you should know from common sense:
Capital (from production) = Waste (from production) + Waste (from capital)
He explains:
Where C(p) is new capital produced, W(p) is existing capital converted to waste in the production of new capital, and W(c) is existing capital converted to waste outside of production. The sum of W(p) and W(c) is M(p), maintenance production, the level of production necessary to maintain capital stocks at existing levels. Thus Equation 1 can be more simply put:
C(p) = M(p) --> steady state
Societies which move from a steady state into a state of expansion produce more than necessary to maintain existing capital stocks:
C(p) > M(p) --> expansion
If the attempt to achieve a steady state fails, or if efforts at increasing resource
intake fall irrevocably behind rising M(p), a society enters a state of contraction, in
which production of new capital does not make up for losses due to waste:
C(p) < M(p) --> contraction
If we take Greer’s equations and apply them to a Chain of Suspicion, with information being the maintenance resource rather than material goods, a solid and predictable model emerges. When the information consumed by castes, niches, or other hierarchical categories is equal to information produced, there is a steady state between the two and they then to understand each other. When the consumption falls below the production rate, there begins a Chain of Suspicion where a clear understanding becomes obscured. When the information consumed rises above its production rate, suspicion calms down until all unknowns are known, and a steady state emerges once again. However, trust still decays over time, and even though all humans have the same Platonic humors, they are not quite equally distributed. The bastard of two castes will, occasionally, rally the underdogs or fail to rally the nobility of an empire. Though they all have the same humors, a degenerated elite will tend to fixate on its lusts, and the eager warriors may embrace a noble creed to build themselves up. Old money develops strange traditions that cannot be easily understood, and new blood produces memes that cannot easily be referenced by the established norms. Here, the cost of stability has an inflation rate, and as it rises so too does the operating cost of the hierarchy. It will inevitably hit the limits of reality, triggering what Greer calls a maintenance crisis. Just as you, dear reader, may have sensed a crises in maintaining yourself during the dark hours of the night, scurrying up to your bed, these crises feature a strong move towards consolidating what’s left of a power structure, and abandoning what’s been left vacant. But that’s the thing, dear reader. When you abandon a place to exacerbate the lack of communication. You add pressure to the Chain of Suspicion. The collapse becomes self-reinforcing. In the Ecosustem, this can eventually stir a region into self-sufficiency, moving the population to conceptualize themselves as living through the “Birth of a Nation”. Have enough of these maintenance crises, and Catabolic Collapse occurs. Differences become so strong that coexistence is simply no longer possible. The only move is to split. Whether that occurs as a national divorce, revolution, or colonization is a total unknown today. But something, either these or another thing, will eventually occur. The Dark Forest burns down, and a new Hierarchy emerges, in order to align Dejure to Defacto.
Consider this, dear reader. When did the Franks declare independence from Rome? Was it when they were given local power in Gaul? Or was it when they elected a king? In fact, they never formally declared themselves independent. But one day their calls for aid from Rome went unanswered, and they were forced to defend themselves. What’s more, no one ever came to punish them for taking the initiative. They simply found themselves the lucky survivors of their own Dark Forest burning down.
With Greer’s equations, we can observe a more technical description of why you closed that door to a dark lower floor as a kid, why the United States abandoned Detroit and other Rust Belt cities, and how the brutality of the Dark Forests can emerge. But, be afraid. A Dark Forest condition is merely the response to an unsustainable maintenance crises. No matter how brutal they are, they are still preferable to the chaos of total collapse. When a Catabolic Collapse occurs, and the Dark Forest burns down, there are no more rules. It is an era of total anarchy. The Foxes either become Lions, or they get eaten by them. But in-between Detroit’s abandonment and a Lutheran Khanate ruling the Midwest Plains, do take some time to read Americana Esoterica to learn more.
Now, dear reader, you may be wondering if there are any ways to escape a Dark Forest, or its eventual Forest Fire. Liu Cixin wrote his Trilogy to critique this tendency to ignore reality, even when the streets out your window are clearly worse than the ones in your photo album. He noted in the west that hyper individualism under a direct democracy ironically often trended towards the lowest common denominator, locking out any anabolic action - a self-reinforcing degeneration towards Catabolic Collapse.
None the less in his third book, Death’s End, he does offer a way out. In it, humanity manages to make contact with the last remains of an extinct civilization from a previous Dark Forest. It was one that existed in a higher dimension. Humanity had no knowledge about this higher dimension, and the words the sentient ruins tell it or quite disturbing. In many ways, he puts into this section the idea of “How do you know you’re in a natural state?”. By that he means, if a man looks out his window and sees ruins, and he has only ever seen ruins, how can he know that what he sees are ruins. Without an education or experience seeing a city at its height, how can he know? Likewise, dear reader, how do you know? Consider the line of dialogue:
The number kept on decreasing by one every ten seconds or so. A few minutes later, the number reached 0. The last message consisted of four Chinese characters:
>I am a tomb.Whose tomb is this?
>The tomb of those who created it.Is this a spaceship?
>It used to be a spaceship. But now it is dead, and so it is a tomb.Who are you? Who is conversing with us?
>I am the tomb. It is the tomb speaking to you. I am dead.You mean you’re a ship whose crew died? In other words, you’re the control system for the ship?
(There was no reply to this.)
We can see many other objects in this region of space. Are they also tombs?
>Most of them are tombs. The others will be tombs soon. I do not know them all.Are you from far away? Or have you always been here?
>I am from far away; they are also from far away, from different places far away.Where?
(There was no answer.)
Did you build this four-dimensional fragment?
>You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea?Are you saying that for you, or at least for your creators, this four-dimensional space is like the sea for us?
>More like a puddle. The sea has gone dry.Why are so many ships, or tombs, gathered in such a small space?
>When the sea is drying, the fish have to gather into a puddle. The puddle is also drying, and all the fish are going to disappear.Are all the fish here?
>The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here.We’re sorry. What you said is really hard to understand.
>The fish who dried the sea went onto land before they did this. They moved from one dark forest to another dark forest.The last sentence was like a thunderclap. The three inside the pinnace cabin and everyone in the distant two mother ships hearing the exchange via a faint link all shuddered.
Dark forest… what do you mean?
>The same thing you mean.Are you going to attack us?
>I am a tomb; I am dead; I will not attack anyone. There is no dark forest state between spaces of different dimensions. The lower-dimensions cannot threaten the higher-dimensions, and the resources of the lower-dimensions are of no use to the higher-dimensions. But the dark forest exists everywhere between those sharing the same dimensions.Can you give us any suggestions?
>Leave this puddle immediately. You are thin pictures. You are fragile. If you stay in the puddle, you will turn into tombs…Is this the only puddle in the universe?
There was no answer. After that, the Ring remained silent and responded no more to attempts at communication.
What Liu Cixin wants you to understand is simple. Those in power have no reason to commit a strike against, for instance, Detroit, because it has already fallen to a lower state of existence. Likewise you, dear reader, may find a way out of this decline by means of willingly embracing a lower state. Like the fish who dried the sea but went on to dry land, you can avoid the Dark Forest-fire by willingly embracing a lower dimension before the collapse. What is a maintenance crises to you, dear reader, if you simply live off your land away from it all? Such an existence could even be the start of anabolic action, which can form the basis of a new hierarchy to come.
While Liu Cixin criticized “escapism” and “defeatism” throughout the trilogy, such ideologies are ultimately the ones he shows to survive in the long run. Living in a Dark Forest can be very rewarding if you hold the power, but recognize when that power is waning and it’s time to escape extinction. Or, perhaps you’ve seen enough, and would rather accept the time you have left before a spark in the Dark Forest burns it all down. Big gamble, lets hope you’re dead with a full belly before it tinders.
