Good morning.

Long ago, when I began to understand the broader energy, material, and ecological foundations

of our current civilization, I intuited that all these biophysical issues were fundamental.

The energy and ecology details would probably be too complex

and slow moving to be what people noticed in their everyday lives. Instead, between and within

countries, people would begin to experience a different economic and psychological reality

than the more or less straight line-up economy

of the past 30 to 40 years, or depending on your boundary, 500 years.

But I didn't yet know back in the day about AI and politics and some other catalysts.

Every civilization faces moments when it frays.

As we've learned on this platform from the likes of Joseph Tainter, Peter Turchin, Luke

Kemp, and many others, when the trajectories of its people's values and capacities diverge sufficiently

because they no longer share the same reality.

I believe we're now entering one of those moments, and I'm framing it here as a quadruple

bifurcation. Bifurcation is a division of something into two

branches or parts that will define the next several decades in the United States and across

of much of the world. Briefly, these four bifurcations are economic, cognitive, psychological,

and worldview. And each of these trends is distinct from the other, unfolding on its own timeline, yet they're now deeply entangled,

integrating with one another in a feedback loop that is quietly becoming the backdrop for what

it means to be human in the 21st century.

Okay, first economically, a few weeks back I described how the median human is actually more

pro-social than the average, given the prevalence and influence of dark triad and psychopathic

...