Chapter 9: Civilization

Civilizations are arteries bleeding toward the stars. Their bed is carved by two sister forces: natural selection sculpting kingdoms in the clay of necessity, and spiritual selection sowing the divine in the dung of dreams. The engine of History is the struggle of forces propelling life.

Rome grasped this dialectic: it forged legions to write its myths, changing blood into sacred ink. Islam inverted the alchemy: it transformed the revelation of the Quran into a conquering blade, metamorphosing ink into blood. Their lesson thunders across the ages: The sword without an altar rusts; the altar without a sword crumbles to dust. No empire endures if it does not bind earth to heaven, without the embrace of a single blood: to the long gestation of God—that is, to offer a sacred narrative that justifies and transcends its earthly power.

But no force endures without regenerating: kings die, priests die… gods too must die for the divine to come. All that resists the vital cycle is swept away by it: The pharaohs sealed their gods in the gold of sarcophagi—they imprisoned only ghosts, transforming Egypt into a gilded corpse. Rome bureaucratized Jupiter, and Christianity germinated in its entrails like a mushroom. Byzantium knelt before its own ashes, forgetting to feed the fire that consumed it. The Maya fattened their gods with pure blood, not seeing that they were poisoning the sky and sacrificing their future.

Nothing is born from the formaldehyde of certainties.

It is not cataclysm that kills a people's soul; it is their will to tear themselves from the law of humus, of cycle, of fertile forgetting. To prevent rotting is in reality to prevent deep spirituality from irrigating a society's quest for meaning. We are tempted to believe that falls are cursed, that chaos is the enemy, that ruin is a shame. Yet in history's silent dance, nothing grows without decomposition; nothing sacred comes that has not first accepted dying and being partly forgotten.

We venerate eternity and the powerful. History is not written by victors but by mushrooms, bacteria, worms, by the tiny invisible world of springtails, by all that decomposes, digests, transforms. These are time's true scribes. As mycelium connects organisms underground, decomposition connects civilizations under time.

Civilizations always die by halves—from a gangrenous body (paralyzed natural selection) or a corrupted soul (betrayed spiritual selection). Their salvation arises only in the joint acceptance of their double perishable nature. Genghis Khan glorified this truth: an empire without shamans is a body without soul, and a shaman without cavalry is a soul without fist. His tomb, hidden somewhere in the vastness of the steppes, is a mute testament: True power is that which, having made the world tremble, consents to rot in silence.

All that refuses to rot in time's air signs not only the end of the fertile cycle; it ends up rotting from within and breeding the worst diseases.

We have traded pyramids for data centers, embalming for digital immortality. Forgetting—that sacred soil where gods germinate—is sterilized by the harsh light of perpetual archiving. Every gesture, every breath, every prayer mummifies in the algorithmic formaldehyde of our artificial memories. The sacred, once a wild flower blooming from the humus of forgetting, becomes a calibrated product, optimized by AIs, predictable for the augmented human who dreams of being demiurge.

This will to absolute control, transforming the sacred into algorithm, culminates in our stranglehold on the living itself. We have become the principal actors of climate change, architects of an age where all selection is short-circuited by technoscience and the worship of progress. The Anthropocene is not merely a contraction of natural and spiritual selections: it is the troubled and painful womb of a divine future struggling to be born.

The Second Human intends to soothe our pains, to purify us from within in the face of the loss of meaning of which he is the symptom. He wants to definitively control natural selection and free souls from spiritual selection. He sees in us at best a patient to heal, at worst rot to eradicate. The Second Human is struck by the same illusions that topple civilizations. He dreams himself a flower without roots, an angel delivered from mud and graves. When he throws all his forces into immaculate utopia, he will understand too late that he was only the final contraction before God's birth… or the final spasm of a cosmic miscarriage.