In the time that we have left...

How would a culture arrive at a decision to devolve? What would that mean? Surely, people would not devolve individually. We are not talking about returning to our evolutionary origins. Devolution, whatever that might turn out to be, would have to be a collective process, one that a whole society would agree to undertake, like, say, returning to human social groupings more typical of the period before the industrial revolution, or of the period before the agricultural revolution.

And why, in the world, would a people decide to devolve? It's not that the decision to devolve and getting there would happen very quickly. It might take generations. Or longer. How would a culture even arrive at a consensus understanding of what it would mean to devolve? How would that culture, our culture, ever be able to develop and implement a process that properly assessed the pros and cons of devolution?

These questions are not mere hypotheticals. It is possible to argue in favor of at least one substantial benefit that would arise from cultural devolution; the benefit that would accumulate (to whomever or to whatever) from the human species devolving from our/its/the current state of voraciously consuming more resources than our planet will ever, can ever, replenish, to becoming a species that lives more lightly in and on our shared biosphere.

How fraught would that process be? How troubled, and dangerous and unrewarding and potentially unrewarded, would the process of changing from existing collectively as a lunatic behemoth in constant struggle with our planetary home to becoming a species fully and productively adapted to an ecological niche in harmony with all other bio organisms and with the visible and invisible forces constantly working to build and level and bury and rebuild the world on which we travel endlessly through the galaxy? How troubled, and dangerous and unrewarding and likely unrewarded would that process of devolution be?

Can we put aside, for a moment, the obvious notion that such an outcome is not actually possible? How would the process begin? How many different people would have to arrive separately at the conclusion that our species must devolve if everything we love is to be saved? How many people would have to arrive individually at the conclusion that we must devolve in order to create a critical mass of such people, a collection of such individuals sufficient to so that they would occur often enough in the larger population to recognize each other and begin to coalesce as a movement advocating for and taking the first steps toward cultural devolution?

Ignite a global movement? Organized in what or whose interest? Gathering power from what source? From the suffering of people who would not survive to the moment when such an enlightened state is realized? Power gathered from the suffering, sucked from the lives of individuals who would be consumed in. the building of such a movement? How would a movement that aimed to protect all that we love calculate the sum of separate sufferings? How would a nascent movement arrive at the conclusion that the benefits from devolution would add up to far more than the sum of the sufferings incurred along the way? How would the movement decide that the collective moral injury suffered along the way to the utopian goal was an affordable cost?

How would such an infant movement quantify the possibility of failure, of incurring all the costs that must be paid along the way to never arriving at the proposed outcome? Of continuing the chase, no matter how long it took, fueled by the agonies of an infinity of humans who would necessarily suffer precisely because we never relented in our pursuit of a phantasm?