Our Civilizational Phase-Shift

From Domination to Symbiosis?

I want to dive into a strange intuition — I felt it very powerfully while reading Peter Wurmsdubler’s “Shift to Sustainability Could Follow Transitions in Complex Systems”: There’s something about the current Donald Trump / techno-fascist, climate-science-denying fiasco that feels like an evolutionary precipice in a biological sense. The emergent metacrisis is both physical and immaterial. It reverberates across the collective field of our species mind, transforming reality on a planetary and even cosmological scale.

An engineer and systems theorist, Wurmsdobler looks at both the Earth system and global civilization as complex, dynamic systems approaching a critical tipping point. Drawing on chaos theory and climate science, he notes that while past changes in global temperature occurred over millions of years, today’s human-driven shifts are happening “several orders of magnitude faster.” As acceleration accelerates, we sense the potential for a system-wide transition into an unknown state.

In his piece, Wurmsdobler discusses “strange attractors,” a concept from Edward Lorenz’s early work in chaos theory. Lorenz modeled the complex trajectories followed by dynamic systems such as the weather. Lorenz’s original model revealed that even deterministic equations, when nonlinear and sensitive to initial conditions, could yield wildly divergent outcomes—this is known as the "butterfly effect."

The Lorenz attractor itself, visualized as a twisting, double-looped structure, models atmospheric convection, but it also illustrates how systems can orbit indefinitely around unstable points without settling into equilibrium. There can be a sudden phase-shift eventually settling into a new steady-state. This is sometimes called “punctuated equilbrium.” Real-world examples of phase shifts and strange attractors include the sudden onset of ice ages, epileptic seizures, and abrupt ecosystem collapses such as lake eutrophication or coral bleaching events. These shifts often occur after long periods of apparent stability, when a system crosses a threshold and moves into a qualitatively different regime. For climate science, this would correspond to a sudden transition from a Holocene-like interglacial period to a much hotter Anthropocene state.

Not all strange attractors lead to negative or entropic outcomes. The birth of language in early humans was a major evolutionary phase shift—an unpredictable leap in culture and consciousness. Language transformed humans from reactive beings to symbolic ones capable of abstraction, memory, collective planning, art, and ritual. Many anthropologists and cognitive scientists believe this was a sudden, “punctuated” event. It can’t be ascribed to a slow accumulation of brain size or vocal tract evolution. Once certain neural, social, and ecological conditions emerged, symbolic culture emerged rapidly, cascading into art, myth, religion, and complex social organization. This was a classic nonlinear transition: a shift to a new attractor in human cognitive and social dynamics.

In complex dynamical systems, such those modeled by strange attractors, the transition—the “flip” to a new regime occurs when the internal indeterminacy reaches a threshold of critical intensity. That moment of maximal instability, where the system is highly sensitive to perturbation, is often where a bifurcation or phase transition occurs. At that point, the system leaves its current “basin of attraction,” passes through a period of radical instability, and eventually settles into a new one, corresponding to a different regime, pattern, or logic of behavior. We seem to be reaching such a threshold as a planetary community.

Wurmsdobler critiques the dominant economic model based on perpetual growth, which is “a contradiction to being on a finite planet.” Despite widespread awareness of ecological limits, political and market systems cannot course-correct. We keep doubling down on industrial growth patterns that will unleash inevitable destruction in the near term. Wurmsdobler suggests that a sustainable transition might be achieved by leveraging system dynamics—flipping destructive feedback loops into regenerative ones. I don’t agree with the mechanisms he proposes for this, which seem too limited and “old paradigm,” but I think he is onto something.

With Trumpism, we undergo a massive regression and repudiation of everything worthwhile and decent about modern American society – which certainly had its share of serious problems and was built on shaky foundations (slavery and genocide) from the start. I find it particularly startling that among those cheerleading and pushing this brutal regression on the populace are a cadre of tech billionaires from what was once the squishy liberal culture of Silicon Valley. They are some of the most lavishly rewarded beneficiaries of the legacy system (of higher education and scientific research) they now seek to dismantle, which they apparently hate and disdain, as a recent Washington Post article on Mark Andreessen made clear.

We are seeing a direct attack against the fragile gains made by women, gays, and ethnic minorities over the last century. The authoritarian impulse is to re-impose an antiquated form of patriarchal control, using the advanced technological tools to build a prison of surveillance, indoctrination, and mass mind control. This is terrifying, truly.

However, here’s a positive intimation: