Pharaohs to AI: The Long Ascent of the Superorganism
The foundational myth of modernity is that infinite economic growth can be sustained on finite energy. This isn’t science—it’s faith in a technological miracle, a sacred narrative that defies physical reality.
Nowhere is that disconnect clearer than in projections like those from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which forecasts a 54% increase in GDP by 2050 while total energy consumption declines by 7% (Figure 1).
Modern economies aren’t just growth-oriented—they’re growth-dependent. Without growth, the system doesn’t bend; it breaks. Yet the progress narrative runs so deep that even our brightest minds remain under its spell.
The drive for perpetual expansion has ancient roots. It didn’t begin with capitalism, fossil fuels or free markets, but with a much older way of organizing societies toward collective control. Lewis Mumford argued that modern civilization wasn’t born with the Enlightenment, but with the fusion of religion, science, conquest, and power in early Egypt and Mesopotamia. These civilizations pioneered what he called the “megamachine”.
These early civilizations weren’t bound together by tools alone—they ran on belief. Rulers claimed divine status, their authority sanctified by the rhythms of the cosmos which were mysteries to the masses but not to the royal mathematicians. The sun and stars offered a model of order—fixed, hierarchical, eternal—which became the basis for political control.
Human labor was forced into massive, disciplined systems, with people reduced to interchangeable parts to build pyramids and monumental cities. It was outwardly about religion, but the real aim was power projection and domination. The pyramid wasn’t just a tomb—it was the blueprint for a mechanized society.
The megamachine didn’t vanish with the pharaohs. As civilizations rose and fell, the core pattern endured: organize people, legitimize power through a progress narrative, and direct collective effort toward ever-larger ambitions.
Today, it’s become what Nate Hagens calls the “superorganism”—a self-organizing, energy-maximizing system that channels human behavior toward growth without conscious direction. It’s not just that we want growth. We’re wired into a system that demands it.
In the West, the superorganism took hold as early as the 10th century when Europe began expanding. Vikings founded settlements as far west as Newfoundland around 1000 AD, and the first Crusade begin about 100 years later. The magnetic compass and gunpowder from China arrived by the 13th century, setting the stage for global empire. The Portuguese exploration of Africa under Prince Henry the Navigator in the mid-1400s led to slave trading before Columbus ever sailed to the Americas.
During the High Middle Ages, Europe made significant advances in navigation, agriculture, urban growth, and technology—much of it driven by monastic discipline and feudal expansion. The Enlightenment caricature of the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and ignorance overlooked how deeply modern Europe’s path was rooted in the innovations and frontier-building of this era.
The discovery of the New World in 1492 was the catalytic event that launched the modern global order. The discovery and colonization of the Americas gave Europe access to vast new supplies of land, labor, and resources. Silver, sugar, slaves, and speculative credit powered an unprecedented expansion of wealth and centralized power.
Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Europe’s geographic expansion was driven by ambition, greed, and the desire to escape old constraints. It was the AI of the 16th century.
“From the beginning, this subjective faith in a New World that would transcend all past human achievements, took hold of the most sober minds.”
Lewis Mumford
The parallel current of scientific exploration investigated a different kind of power by deciphering the heavens and natural laws. It sought mastery through abstraction: to map the stars, measure time, and reduce nature to predictable formulas.
Most narratives about the present begin with the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th to early 19th century, as if history before steam and steel were merely a prelude. But the first half of the 16th century was just as transformative. In 1543, Copernicus displaced the Earth—and with it, humanity—from the center of the cosmos. That same year, Vesalius dissected centuries of dogma by revealing the body not as a vessel of divine mystery but as an anatomical machine. In 1545, Cardano’s Ars Magna laid the foundation for describing the world in terms of algebraic structure and mechanical law. And in 1546, Fracastoro proposed that disease spread through invisible particles—centuries ahead of germ theory.
Together, these breakthroughs didn’t just expand knowledge—they shifted the foundations of meaning. The world, once animated by spirit and governed by divine order, became a system to decode, measure, and control. The West crossed a civilizational threshold—from enduring within natural limits to seeking their systemic transcendence. In this framework, salvation wasn’t spiritual or moral—it was technical.
Science and the drive to conquer new lands fused into a single civilizational mission: to replace nature’s wild abundance with systems of control, precision, and extraction. Western expansion wasn’t just about reaching new places or gaining knowledge—it was about reshaping the world according to human—not divine—will.
Our modern predicament didn’t begin when we noticed the climate shifting or energy becoming more expensive. It began much earlier—with the ancient impulse to dominate nature, to centralize power, and to structure society around unending extraction. This isn’t a modern glitch but a progressive condition, at least five millennia in the making. It took on its distinctly Western form about a thousand years ago.
As thoughtful people wrestle with the delusion that infinite economic growth can continue on a finite planet—or that AI will somehow deliver us from the consequences of our own designs—it’s worth asking whether this mindset is not simply an error, but an adaptation. Perhaps it’s evolutionary—baked into the psyche long ago. The belief that technology can fix the damage done by previous technologies is not just misguided. It’s a faith. And one that must be examined with more than technical cleverness—it requires ruthless honesty.
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Hi Art;
Have seen your discussions over at Nate’s TGS, but first time to your site.
That GDP/energy consumption projection chart was an eye opener. Can you explain that a bit more? Was that chart at the EIA website, or modified by you?, do they explain their assumptions? What are those RHS, LHS abbreviations?
I had always had a vague idea that EIA was mostly singing the conventional tune, but that chart shows a real lack of conceptual understanding of the two economies.
Thanks,
Steve
Steve,
The data is from EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2025 but the chart is mine, and I have not seen a similar one from EIA. The explanation is that efficiency is decoupling GDP and energy consumption. There’s a little truth to that but it’s a small effect, and can’t explain the divergence.
RHS=right hand scale, LHS=left hand scale–a standard convention. A simple Google search would resolve that question.
All the best,
Art
Enjoyed the insights & subsequent conclusions from your post. I shared it with quite a few family & friends. I’ve gotten where I question everything where I would just accept the narrative. Past five years or so have really had an effect in how I view the world & my life. Thank You Art!
Scott,
I appreciate your comments.
All the best,
Art
“Western expansion wasn’t just about reaching new places or gaining knowledge—it was about reshaping the world according to human—not divine—will.”
Yes i think you hit the nail on the head with that statement.
This has been a fundamentally Luciferian process. (reshaping the world according to human- not divine- will)
I know that giving this process a religious name makes a lot of people very uncomfortable.
But if you know the story of Lucifer and story of western expansion the parallels are quite striking.
dobbs,
Lucifer represents the Promethean drive in humanity—the urge to master nature, override boundaries, and force the world to conform to human will. I have no issue with religion, so long as it’s approached mythically and metaphorically, not as literal doctrine.
As Jung put it, God is a psychic fact.
All the best,
Art
A brilliant article!
Ever advancing technology will solve everything, including all the problems caused by previous technology.
This is indeed the hallmark of a faith.
We are rushing headlong to the impenetrable wall of finite energy and resources and are certain in our belief that AI or even more advanced technology will punch a big hole in that wall.
Ray,
Thanks for your thoughts. My guess is that financial overshoot and geopolitics will be more disruptive in the next decade or so than energy, resources or climate change.
All the best,
Art
Interesting article Art, I look forward to your next instalment, in the meantime, just wondering if it’s going to end up as just another Apocaloptomist’s prediction where everyone gets through the ecological bottleneck of the great simplification bruised and battered, but intact, I mean you wouldn’t want to upset any of your readers with thoughts of anything like humanity heading for a mass cull due to ecological overshoot, would you, as even William E. Rees won’t quite forecast going that far🤔
Barry,
We don’t really have any way of knowing how this will play out although it doesn’t look good. I fall back on Nate’s belief that awareness is our best hope of a future better than the default. It is pure speculation to try to quantify how much better or worse that will be.
All the best,
Art
a lovely treatment but its only an intorduction to deeper thoughts and analysis about 1) how much of hwere humanity and civilization are going is unalferable destiny 2) how much can be controlled or channeled 3)of -2- what values and concerms might lead us to pick which directions for humanity. are you a monist? a dualist? what kind of choices do you think are appropriate for channeling our magick our religion our choices of which technologies to pursue.
Zeev,
Thanks for both of your comments. My pragmatic side suggests that it will take a traumatic event to change the path forward. On the other hand, the level of indeterminacy in the real world is largely ignored in our credences and forward assumptions. My next post will deal with that subject.
All the best,
Art
You are one well-read guy, Art! I admire how you related Lewis Mumford’s ‘megamachine’ to Nate Hagens’ superorganism. I think you’ve gone well beyond unmasking the Myth of Infinite Growth, exposing it as a sacred fiction, not a forecast rooted in physical science.
But by tracing modernity’s organizing principles—centralization, abstraction, and systemic domination—back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, you reframe MTI civilization not as a break from the past, but as the full maturation of a very old social pattern. Your observation that we’ve simply refined and scaled the system of control that produced the pyramids strongly confronts the idea that modernity began with a steam engine mining coal in England. This view is powerful because it reframes MTI civilization not as a break from some idealized environmentally harmonious past, but as the continuation of a very old social pattern.
I’m a bit conflicted, however, about the implications of the notion of a superorganism. Yes, it eliminates the illusion of human control and makes techno-optimism seem not merely misguided but delusional. And it’s a subtle but profound reframing: we are not the designers—we are components of a design that emerged through system dynamics.
But is there a role for individual agency within the superorganism? If individual humans are components of a system that evolved for growth, what possibilities exist for conscious refusal, deprogramming, or counter-adaptation? I think single humans or even groups of humans might still affect the superorganism’s operations and direction (though the mechanism isn’t clear to me yet), but I suspect there is a lot of serendipity involved.
Frank,
I appreciate you observations. I’ve discussed the deterministic implications of the superorganism model with Nate and he doesn’t see it that way. Instead, it’s a matter of awareness–the first step to a future better than the default.
I will publish a post on quantum decision theory in the next few days that will address your concerns about agency. I don’t think our classical models are very good.
All the best,
Art
Thank you for bringing a bit of sanity into a delusional world. It’s important, even if only a handful of people hear you.
Pieter-Jan,
Thanks for your comment. I have no illusion about the size and capacity of my audience.
All the best,
Art