A tale as old as time. You can’t have good governance if you don’t have benevolent people. Bad ingredients, bad dish. Repeat until our technology exceeds our wisdom and triggers the answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Life in the universe is probably somewhat scarce over time and space. We detect extra-solar life by radio emissions. Radio emissions require technology. Any life that evolves into technological beings suffers the same fate of exponential growth and resource degradation. (Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries or some alternate flavourings like nuclear weapons, or Militarized AI or Biological warfare gone mad.)

The biological imperatives that made life capable of continuing evolution for billions of years (maximum power principle) is likely incompatible with technological beings. Our intellect governed by our instincts is fundamentally at odds.

As we grow in sophistication in our technology, culture and governance systems, we find ourselves building higher and higher the biggest metaphorical Jenga tower while simultaneously our primitive tendencies are pulling out pillars. We know how every game of Jenga must end.

We can choose to stop building the tower. However it’s already unstable so that isn’t enough to secure it.

We could deconstruct the tower and use those pieces to shore up a stable tower. (Degrowth)

But it looks like we’re going to try to build to tower so fast and so high in the hopes of achieving escape velocity. We know how this ends.