The Great Filter is Love
There’s a pretty simple formula for calculating when we destroy ourselves.
First you identify technology that can potentially destroy you.
Next you determine the cost of the technology, and calculate the number of people who can afford it.
Next you calculate the intelligence required to make it all work, and eliminate the target folks in your list less intelligent than that.
Then, you determine the average number of people in the general human population that are statistically certain to carry out killing everyone using that technology.
If the number of people on your first list exceeds the percentage of psychopaths in your population , then there is a greater than 50% chance that the world will end in the span of time it takes for a person to learn about that new technology, purchase it, and turn it on.
A moment of consideration about the above mathematics reveals the stark fact of the situation — it is impossible for a species to remain technologically-advanced if their population contains even a small percentage of psychopaths, because technological progress guarantee that the price of technology drops low enough and ease of use drops far enough that it is a guarantee that at least one person in the pool of psychopaths in the species will act on the opportunity.
This is a dynamic driven by the simple probabilities of the factors that comprise it and as such acts as a hard limit on the species. It’s not something that can be dealt with or mitigated with half-measures. It’s statistics.
The inferences made from here are clear. There are a limited number of options:
- Limit technological growth
- Limit technological access
- Limit access to information
- Limit the number of psychopaths among us
Any applied limits to technological growth or access defeat the nature of technology and therefore the logical action following that path is the cessation of technological research beyond the point of comfort.
But that’s not viable because then enforcement of the technological restrictions becomes an issue.
The highly technological ‘nation-state’ or centralized model requires complete technological control of every person in order for the system to function — halfway measures will not be applied in such scenarios, because they lead to the complete destruction of the system as a statistical certainty.
The alternative is to limit the number of psychopaths among us. Performing this task collectively and earnestly, by becoming a healthier species, a more caring species, is a process of conscious, directed evolution — an evolution which is rapidly transformative individually and collectively. But it must be chosen.
It is our measure — or lack — of love that acts as the great filter to determine our destiny. Until we learn that leaving even a single member behind or uncared for among us is a guarantee of eventual species desxtruction, nature will meet our attempts at growth with destruction.
The Great Filter is our own lack of animation of our capacity to love — love not just things that satisfy our moments desires, but all things, because we can — because it is the only thing that mitigates the statistical realities that nature presents.
