The Obstructed Potential A living thing does not begin with a destiny. It begins with potential. A seed contains possibilities that are not yet visible. A child at a piano may possess extraordinary musical ability, but without a piano that ability remains largely theoretical. A person may have the mind of an inventor and never receive the education, tools, peace, or time necessary to invent anything. A civilization may contain thousands of capable people whose abilities disappear simply because history…

Parables and Characters Working Table of Contents PART I — THE PARABLES PART II — RECURRING CHARACTERS PART III — CORE CANON If we eventually need a smaller group of primary parables, these appear to form the strongest initial canon: PART IV — POSSIBLE ORGANIZATION BY THE LIVING PREROGATIVES The parables may eventually organize themselves around the larger philosophical progression: REALITY PARTICIPATION INTERACTION COMPOSURE TRANSMISSION TIME LOSS CIVILIZATION TRAJECTORY CALIBRATION ATTUNEMENT PART V — THE CENTRAL FIGURES If the mythology…

The Living Prerogatives As The Living Prerogatives continues to take shape, a vocabulary is emerging alongside it. Some of these words describe ideas. Some describe processes. Some are metaphors. Some are characters, places, objects, or stories that keep returning. They are not all equally important, and not all of them need formal definitions. Some may eventually become essays. Some may become parables. Some may remain images that are better understood through experience than explanation. This is a working map of…

Article III The Dog Has Caught the Car: What Happens After Success? There is another expression that seems almost designed for the problem we are examining: The dog has caught the car. We use the phrase to describe a strange kind of success. Someone spends enormous energy pursuing an objective. They finally achieve it. And then comes the obvious question: Now what? The humor comes from imagining the dog standing beside the captured car with no obvious next instruction. The…

Article II The Cat’s Out of the Bag: How Solutions Scale Problems There is an old expression: The cat’s out of the bag. Once something has escaped, the situation has changed. You can put the cat back in the bag. But you cannot return to the moment before the cat escaped. Something has happened. A new condition now exists. This is a surprisingly useful way to think about human civilization. Because when we solve problems, we rarely eliminate them completely.…

Article I A Preliminary Framework for Understanding Life and Civilization Abstract Human civilization is composed of increasingly complex systems built around more fundamental biological requirements. Food becomes agriculture; shelter becomes architecture and property; communication becomes language, writing, and telecommunications; coordination becomes institutions and government. These structures increase human capacity, but they can also introduce constraints that were not present in the original problem. This article proposes a preliminary conceptual framework, The Living Prerogatives, for examining that relationship. The central hypothesis…

Introduction: Before Civilization Human civilization is an extraordinarily complicated thing. We live inside systems that have accumulated over thousands of years: governments, economies, religions, legal systems, schools, cities, technologies, corporations, transportation networks, communications systems, and cultural traditions. Most of the time, we experience these systems as simply the world. A child is born into a house, a neighborhood, a language, a currency, a school system, a political system, and a technological environment. None of these structures were designed by the…