Death Worship
Nature puts limits on every species. Most, if they grow too fast, will eat themselves out of food and die off. Others become too powerful and end up becoming prey for other species. Still others self-destruct simply by dominating their environment so much that they fail to adapt to it, at which point they drift into irrelevance and cannot react to changes in their environment. Humanity has a built-in limiter: all of our civilizations destroy themselves once they get too powerful. Up until now, this has kept us from tearing up the planet, but with technology (notably the internal combustion engine) we beat the odds, it seemed. Now we realize that we are not safe from our own suicidal pathology, but instead, will just experience a harder fail as our societies disintegrate. In our case, this pathology begins when we become individualistic, or prioritize ourselves over the larger order. We can have only one: either our goal and measurement of the world is the self, or it is an order ...