Systemic Organisms

How Humanity Has Already Orchestrated Its Fall From the Top of the Food Chain

There is a somewhat common trope in science fiction that man will be forced into conflict with a new type of life form that man himself has created, perhaps most archetypically envisioned in the grim future of the Terminator franchise. These anxieties seem ever more relevant as AI continues to grow in sophistication before our very eyes. There is a palpable sense that we may be on the precipice of irreversible change, and it is not clear whether we will be better off for it. Maybe we’ll get Star Trek, but discourse seems to focus on Terminator. Human negativity bias in action.

But what is the actual anxiety around Terminator, specifically? Humanity creates an ultra sophisticated AI in Skynet, which determines that humanity is the greatest threat to itself, and thus it launches a preemptive strike against us. We are consequently thrust into conflict with a more sophisticated, human-manufactured species that credibly threatens to replace us as the dominant life form on Earth.

This is the essence of the horror of Terminator and similar works. That humanity will be the architect of the very life form that dethrones us as the dominant life form on Earth.

And with all the developments in AI it is no surprise that people start to look at Terminator like a hyperstition. However, I believe we’ve actually already crossed this threshold. I believe we are already living in a world where humanity is not the dominant life form on Earth. We have already been replaced by a new class of organism, that we ourselves created. And while, mercifully, this organism has not launched a preemptive strike against us, I believe it is largely to blame for much of the malaise that seems to linger over modern life, and much of the political turmoil we are witnessing around the world can be more precisely understood as an esoteric conflict for supremacy between this organism and humanity. This organism is not AI, and its birth is something of an accident, but it has come to dominate us nonetheless. I am of course referring to the “Systemic Organism.”

As I discussed in a previous article, “Emergent Minds,” I think that we generally have a fundamentally limited understanding of the nature of consciousness. To briefly recap here, rather than limiting consciousness to a phenomenon of the brain, we could better understand consciousness as an emergent phenomenon of any network. A kind of computation and associated experience of being to determine how any networked interaction behaves. Thus how “conscious” something is could be understood as a function of how complex the associated network producing that consciousness is. Further, that these networks need not be limited to the brain or even matter that we would conventionally recognize as organic.

I would raise again the example of the ant colony. The individual ant is an organism with a brain and some meager consciousness in a form that we would recognize. But individually the ant is not very sophisticated. Its intelligence is primitive and on its own, it is not capable of much. However, when you have an entire colony of ants interacting together, they efficiently self organize and execute highly coordinated and complex behaviors that completely eclipse those of the individual ant. The ant colony has its own higher-order consciousness above that of the ants themselves. This consciousness is not confined to one brain, but is rather dispersed across the entire network, because it is the network, not the nerve cells in the ants, where intelligence and thus consciousness resides.

If this is true of ants, why not of people? I believe networked human activity likewise produces higher order consciousness, which I have been referring to as “Systemic Organisms.” These Systemic Organisms have much the same relationship to humans as the ant colony has to individual ants. The Systemic Organism is first and foremost embodied in a decentralized manner, its “existence” spread across all that are members of its network. No one ant embodies the ant colony, but the ant colony acts upon the world through the collective action of each individual ant. So too, the Systemic Organism is not embodied in any one man, but it acts in the world by directing the actions of its constituent members through complex signaling mechanisms. In the human body, cells are directed with neurotransmitters. In the ant colony, ants (cells) are directed with pheromone signals. In the Systemic Organism, humans (cells) are directed by email, Zoom calls, contracts, forms, and the economy (which is just the neurotransmitter of the National Systemic Organism, the Bionation). And what is email anyway if not a set of photonic transmitters at least as complex as the evolved neurotransmitters of the body?

The Systemic Organism is thus a higher-order consciousness born from networked human activity. They can manifest as corporations, bureaucracies, or even informal networks (i.e. like minded people on social media). It is a different class of organism altogether. If you tried to place them in taxonomy, they would likely branch off at or possibly even above the domain level. But I think it is critical to understand these networks as organisms in their own right to understand how they behave, and what our relationship to them is. Because they do behave as independent organisms.

They have their own will, which is not necessarily aligned with human will or wellbeing. This will appears to be aligned with the most basic will of all life forms, which is to grow, expand, and sustain itself. Moreover, this will has its own intelligence which is capable of behaving in ways that are beyond total comprehension by even the most senior humans within its network. It can thus be said to be independent or disconnected from human thought or understanding, much in the same way that I am conscious, my consciousness dictates what my hand shall do, but my hand has no way of predicting what I will do.

And these Systemic Organisms are not new. Humans, as social animals, have always banded together in tribes even in our most primitive form. There have thus always been networks of human activity that would produce some kind of higher intelligence, starting with a kind of tribal consciousness, and ramping up to the networks of modernity. But I think it is precisely the enhancement of human networking capability that has knocked us off our pedestal as the dominant life form on Earth. When our networking technology was limited, the Systemic Organism did not have much power or will in its own right. What was good for the tribal Systemic Organism was generally aligned with the good of its tribe. Further, the actual sophistication of this network was very limited. It could coordinate more successful hunts, but its behavior was still relatively primitive.

But over time human societies began to scale, and the complexity of these human networks increased. As consciousness is a function of the complexity of a network, the more complex human societies got, the more sophisticated the Systemic Organism’s intelligence became. Here we can also start to see more layers of Systemic Organisms begin to emerge. At one level you might have a guild, another a city state, higher still an empire. But there were still technical limitations constraining human networks, their speed, and their sophistication. In this period of ascendent humanity the Systemic Organism grew with us, but did not eclipse us.

But sometime in the late 19th century this began to change. The Industrial Revolution brought with it the lesser known Managerial Revolution. I believe that the Managerial Revolution is, to the Systemic Organism, something akin to the Cognitive Revolution in humanity some 70,000 years ago. In humans, this moment marks a rapid expansion of our intellectual capabilities and subsequently our dominance on Earth, believed to be caused by the advent of complex language. The Managerial Revolution, similarly, acts as a kind of watershed moment for the development of higher order consciousness in Systemic Organisms, as this moment marks a deliberate attempt by humans to rapidly develop and enhance the capabilities of human networks.

The Managerial Revolution came about because the Industrial Revolution was massively enlarging the scale of society. Directing this ever larger society increasingly necessitated the application of managerial science to keep everything functioning. Enlargement brought complexity by its nature. There were more nodes in the network, and each new node significantly increases overall complexity. But managing all those nodes lead to the development of technologies and techniques specifically meant to amplify those network capabilities. This is like a kind of feedback loop for complexity, and again, consciousness is a function of the complexity of the network. Thus as society became more complex, managerialism was applied to manage that complexity, which in turned increased the complexity, leading to a rapid development of the consciousness of the Systemic Organism.

Further, it became something of a national project in countries around the world to develop these systems. In other words, societies increasingly began to focus their attention on the development needs of these systems, rather than the needs of individual people. This is the mechanism by which Systemic Organisms came to take on a role of primacy in society. Society dedicated itself to enlarging these organisms until the “importance” of the Systemic Organism eclipsed that of the human organism with respect to what society concerned itself with, and how society directed its energy.

And this is fundamentally the reason that modern life feels so alienating to people. We have ceased to be a human society. We live in a Systemic Organism society. This is why so much of our lives seem to revolve around these systems, whether they be a corporation or a public bureaucracy. It is why economic success is measured by the S&P 500, but the Consumer Price Index is rigged (by Systemic Organisms in the Federal Government) so that the true heights to which prices have climbed are obfuscated. It is why individual human expression is suppressed and encouraged to be sanitized in line with corporate image, even off the clock. This is the Systemic Organisms’ will to expression superseding that of the human. It is why corporations are encouraged to lay-off their staff and offshore work to cheaper nations. It is more efficient for the system (or at least the system perceives it to be more efficient). The human concern does not take primacy.

The will of Systemic Organisms has superseded that of the human, and we see this expressed in politics as well. We nominally live in a Democracy (or at least a Republic) where “We the People” have control over the operation of the government. But in practice, observers are increasingly noting that this is not actually how modern government operates. Much more important than any President, any elected official, any Justice, was the managerial control of the unelected administrative state. Even if the President nominally has control of parts of it, the Systemic Organisms that are the federal bureaucracies are largely autonomous, with their own will, and their own power. In other words, our elected officials are not leading us. No human is leading us. We are led by the Federal Egregore that is the consciousness of this absolutely titanic Systemic Organism. And it rules in the perceived interests of systems.

This phenomenon was perfectly encapsulated in the Biden administration, where it increasingly became clear that with Biden’s visible cognitive decline, no one actually appeared to be at the top of the leadership pyramid. And yet, government carried on. In this moment, even the illusion of an individual human atop the system was shattered. Who was in charge of the country? No human you could point to. A process sat in the Oval Office. A Systemic Organism was the President.

And this phenomenon of rule by Systemic Organism can be seen more broadly across government. Much of the reason that, prior to Donald Trump, the two major political parties in the US felt so similar and only superficially different was because they were both Pro-Systemic Organism Parties. The distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans was that they were pro Public Systemic Organism and pro Private Systemic Organism respectively. Neither party represented the interests of humans.

And so we may ask ourselves what would it take to place humans back in charge? To elevate the needs of humans to a position of primacy over the needs of systems? How can humanity reassert its dominance as the apex life form? Curtis Yarvin does not operate within this framework, but he certainly has ideas that would seem to trend in this direction. Because if the fundamental problem for why society feels so alienating and miserable today is that we ceased to be the dominant life form on Earth, then maybe what is needed is for a human, as in a human individual, to have complete supremacy over the will of systems.

In other words, if our society is ruled by Systems in the interest of Systems, maybe we need society to be ruled by a human in the interest of humans. For human needs to take precedence in governance, we must restore a system where a human occupies a position of supremacy over the Systemic Organism. By definition, this must concentrate power over the system in a human individual. And this would appear to align very neatly with Yarvin’s conception of Monarchy, and broader Neoreactionary thought.

We could never do away with Systemic Organisms entirely, as human society is impossible without them. They are an unavoidable emergent phenomenon. But we could put an individual human being in a position of true primacy over the Systemic Organism, such that the behavior of Systemic Organism is compelled to act in accordance with the well-being of humans. The only way to have this primacy is to truly put one individual above all systems. For any collective placed above systems produces a higher order systemic consciousness itself. Thus it must be one man, who experiences consciousness at the human level, and can direct the Systemic Organism to the will of the human level consciousness. In this subjugation of the Systemic Organism to a human will, we can forcibly reassert primacy over Systems. This is how we restore humanity to modern life.

And this is why Trump is such an important figure in the political landscape. He is, the first and only presidential candidate since the Managerial State was really established in earnest under FDR, to be an Anti-Systemic Organism candidate. This is why Trump feels so different. It is why many establishment Republicans started to consolidate under the Democrat banner. The pro-private and pro-public wings of the pro-Systemic Organism party were compelled to unite and align against their mutual enemy in true anti-System sentiment. Trump sincerely wants to diminish the power and influence over society by the Systemic Organism. This is why his ascendency feels so different, and why the pro-System parties are so intensely opposed to him.

And Trump appears to roughly understand how to actually achieve his anti-System goals. Systems are resilient. You can’t pull out one bad actor and reform the system’s behavior. The only punishment man can really deal to the Systemic Organism is to destroy it. And Trump is trying very hard to destroy, cripple, and maim the various organs of Leviathan via DOGE, while restoring pro-human sanity and order by executive order.

In this there is an opportunity to seriously renegotiate the power dynamic between the human and Systemic organism, and while I doubt Trump will go all the way and reassert total human supremacy over Leviathan, I think he will deal it a staggering underdog blow that necessitates some kind of sincere realignment, even if that comes in the form of killing today’s Systemic Organisms and replacing them with new ones better aligned to human needs (at least for now).

And so for the first time, I feel a kind of optimism about this struggle. Perhaps not a total defeat of Skynet, but dealing it a devastating blow. Something that suggests we can have a brighter future for humanity, and pivot away from this increasing cogification of the human soul.

Perhaps John Connor can defeat Skynet in the end after all. I certainly hope to see it happen.