The Cosmological Crisis — lecture Oct 9, 2026

The Cosmological Crisis

Camus, the absurd, and the persistence operator — a lecture

Oct 9, 2026

From the human crisis to the cosmological crisis

I was thinking about Camus this morning, and his lecture “The Human Crisis.” The Fall is one of my favorite books ever written. I’d put it right alongside Notes from Underground and A Season in Hell as essential existentialist literature. I want to reach back through Camus, and through that lecture, which I think might more aptly be called the cosmological crisis.

Consider the world that has been constructed: a grid of information, culture, technology and civilizations, with all their religious stories and narrations, persistently at war with one another since the industrial age. World War I, World War II, the Cold War and everything since are all part of the same problem: the fact that the world now exists as and of itself. To examine this absurdity is to examine the breaking open of humanity’s energetic container.

We’ve already covered how and why this happens historically, in terms of modernity, thermodynamics and persistence architecture. That’s all in my other works, so I won’t rehash it here. But this assembly, which Camus calls the absurd, is not so absurd cosmologically.

I believe Camus and Gogol are really one and the same in what they observe about human history, behavior, cruelty and nature. They see by-products of something not yet understood philosophically, scientifically or ontologically in their times: Gogol in the nineteenth century, Camus in the twentieth. What they observe is the outcome of persistence architectures: siloed, or pseudo-siloed, beings.

We understand the thermodynamic, entropic universe as never truly closed. In the same way, these beings must frantically try to close themselves, or clothe themselves, for lack of a better word.

The descent

To descend into the ontological container, the abyss of existence, is to follow the path of the goddess Inanna. Her descent appears in what I take to be the first known poetry in world history, from the priestess of Inanna in Sumer. Inanna descends into the place of transformation, the ground of being, to reach, I believe, her sister.

That archetypal story appears everywhere, from Inanna to Orpheus, Hercules, even Odysseus. What it shows us is that the world is not what it seems.

This is why surrealism emerges in the period of the World Wars. We get the breakdown of language and meaning, and the fracture of perspective in Cubism. All of these historical, artistic and literary movements point to a fundamental systemic reality: the human architectures that have been built are farcical, a lie, deeply untrue.

At root, every person knows this. That knowledge creates the strange scandal of twisted faces in the world’s bureaucratic centers: the tight suits, the proclamations made with all the fervor of someone desperate to survive. They believe none of what they are saying, and yet they believe it entirely, as they must.

Behind the mask

This is the sad, pathetic nature of all human history: behind the mask lies only the persistence operator. And behind the persistence operator lies only the play of forms in space and time, the attempt to build the form that will fly the farthest or exist the longest.

This is replicated in human behavior itself, as Darwin came to understand in the nineteenth century. In a sense his work bridges Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. We come to realize that the transformation hidden beneath and behind matter is an energetic transformation, an informational and technological transformation that contains, holds and expresses energy across spacetime. It is an extremely valuable scientific observation, and it leads to the ontological ground from which we now speak: the persistence operator.

The world is equal parts mess and disaster. To view it this way is to see a grid of necessary transformations, holding up a species-wide transformative process. At the local level that process is desperate to survive and reproduce. At the transpersonal level it is not entirely human; it never was and never will be.

The human being is a phase in this energetic transformation, the current iteration of the container itself. The container has evolved through a long, glacial shift, from single-celled organisms to apes to humankind to whatever comes next, expanding the potential of this generative, technological container of being. We see this everywhere in the evolution and transformation of species. Many species are extinguished; many are no longer identifiable as what they were. Which is to say, none of them exist.

Yet the bureaucratic halls, the centers of commerce and the digital grids of information all appear terrifyingly real. Everything they do and are appeals to the center of the existential condition: to survive and reproduce at the local level, the condition of all organisms in space and time.

The individualist paradigm

When we look out at this culture of madness, we see every excuse, justification and reason, but none of the logic: none of the self-awareness needed to build a world that reckons with this condition. Awareness of the condition is dim at best, cloaked by the fear of death.

On top of that, the necessary realization would require a total transformation of the existing infrastructural grids. Those grids serve generated, manufactured cultural, social and political power. That power allocates resources to those who most debase themselves and fall deepest into pure survival: those willing to destroy, maim and submit the world to their whims, their urges, their individualistic motives.

This is what we see in the modern world: an individualist global paradigm. Some rise to the top of the heap of the dead; others fall beneath it. This has been the paradigm of most of natural history, and of cosmological history beyond it.

But as we’ve discussed, the advent of the forebrain, and our growing use of that technology, has let us understand more and more deeply what it is to be. We can understand ourselves not only as limited, bound individual organisms between birth and death, but as this entire universal process of construction, deconstruction, iteration and attempt across vast cosmological scales. This realization necessarily terraforms, and must terraform, cultural modes built on the individual presumption and on consumption at all costs.

Looking across history, we see the pathos of paradigms that failed to meet the true nature of human identity: the kingships and empires of old, and modern governments veiled by corporate and private economic power, puppeted by the forces of wealth. We see a species that has failed to rise to the occasion of recognizing its true communal, cosmological identity and implementing it in its behavior.

The technology of the self

This requires a vast amount of self-awareness, and conscious behavior, choice and action in light of the truth. The truth changes not only cultural and civilizational technology and infrastructure, but the technology of the self. Becoming aware of the truth no longer centers the private, sheltered individual organism existing between birth and death. It privileges the entire network of life, and understands that network to be itself, as it is.

Understand the consequences. This is a transformation, at the level of self-identity, self-realization and self-perception, of the closed, survival-based organism of millions of years. It meets these primordially encoded behaviors from a place of consciousness and awareness, and actively changes them.

From that place, it then creates infrastructures, ideals, values and systems that emerge from this foundational perception and express it more adequately in space and time, in a communal orientation toward all life and being. This is the transformation called for at this moment in human history.

The somnambulism of survival

What Camus grasps in “The Human Crisis,” in his concept of the absurd and in The Fall , is the species’ failure to reach an authentic ontological encounter. Having failed, it falls victim to a fate in many ways worse than death: life in a world of profoundly inauthentic, violent, bare, rote survival.

It is a spell that cannot be broken, a somnambulism that continues day after day into an abyss of emptiness. Only the organism’s survival matters, so the whole culture of survival and competition is prioritized to the point that the organism can never truly rest. It can never find meaning, because it is immersed in chaos and conflict.

This is the world we observe through religion, ideology and political power, through the invention of the nation-state, and through the race of technological reproduction: who can produce the most forceful device, the fastest, and use it to manipulate markets and grids of social and political power in their favor. This race is the meaningless race itself. It is the race furthest from the awareness that would require the change of paradigm I’m describing.

This is the terror of modernity. Sartre and Camus worked feverishly against it as it mounted in the mid-twentieth century, and it has only accelerated and fractured further since. It is a mad race at the base of an organism that has lost all sense of being, and of its entwinement with the cosmos, with nature, with plants and animals, with the whole ecosystem of awakening life. The organism has come to perceive itself as a private survivability.

Civilizations that failed to become civil

Paradoxically, even as these civilizations appear to grow, they become less and less civilized, if a civilization means a community. This is the tragedy and failure of human consciousness throughout history, and perhaps never more so than in modernity. These civilizations have failed to become civil. They have become only the broken, twisted faces of what they promised.

They leave each animal in deeper isolation within their systems, demanding that it produce at an ever madder pace toward no end. This is the grinding of the machine of modernity as it threatens to break against the real limits of ecology and of human nature itself: the human being as a limited energetic force within a larger matrix of transformation. This is what Camus witnessed in the mid-twentieth century and called the absurd.

That force has only grown stronger in its pull on the identity of the animal. The animal is conscripted by the military, by state biography, by digital technology, by institutional education, by political economy, by surveillance technology. All of these forces keep reaffirming the limited identity, then limit it further within political, institutional and civilizational systems that insist on a solid, singular entity.

This is the further twisting, the further violence, the further breaking of the human being under the mad, desperate drive for profit and personal power, which is the only thing powering these grids of information and technology.

If these grids were truly to be broken, they would have to be broken at the level of ontological self-awareness: the understanding of the transformative force beyond birth and death. All things, if we can call them things, exist in terms of the persistence operator: persistence against constraint in an entropic universe. And beyond all things, what makes them what they are and takes them in and out of being is the experimentation and play of a larger cosmic force, observable phenomenologically in nature since the birth of the universe.

Without this transformation, what we see, have seen and will see is a continued reaffirmation, out of desperation and out of the broken ontological community, of the fractured, isolated organism in the wilderness. It is the reaffirmation of power structures that serve only to extract as much as possible from the world and deliver its resources to the fewest: those who control the levers and switches.

The few who escape

When we look for respite or empowerment in culture, whether art, music, literature or philosophy, none of it offers solace. It perpetuates the only identity that now exists, the one conscripted into and onto the world: the isolated, selfish individual. This is the sad, twisted paradox. What human beings have become is all they have been allowed to become, except for the few in history who escaped into a broader conception of truth in the cosmological universe.

I’ve talked about Spinoza, and I’ll mention him again: the real ontological work of revealing the total self as cosmological, as process, as nature. Goethe too. This realm has long been the province only of the intellectually or spiritually vigorous, most often both. They sought the truth of form and of being itself, beyond the programmatic technology of the individual that haunts all of human history, day after day, moment after moment.

Watching these constrained organisms walk through and take part in an empty culture that can only gratify the individual, we witness the project failing, as it always has. The change that must be made is a vast change in our conception of the human being.

To walk in this world as Gogol depicts it in “The Nose” or Dead Souls is to walk in a ludicrous world: ludicrous in how limited, narrow and self-serving it is. Forces like love, justice and truth are sharply limited within the enclosed reality of an organism that can conceive of its being only within the narrows of the body and the breath.

This is tragedy. It needs no literary or historical depiction, because it is in all literature and all history. It is the persistence operator acting through the scared, dying animal: an animal that is pure persistence architecture, that has achieved no recognition of what it truly is, and so cannot be or act from that place. It can act only from the fear of death. This is the first cowardice, replicated over and over in human history. It is the behavior we observe everywhere.

Courage and real ethics

Only from a place of true ontological awareness can we act with the courage and dignity needed to transform our world for the better. That awareness requires us to stand where we truly are: in the cosmological self. If we can do that, as a species or as beings, we can stand among being itself, in its presence, and act in accord with what being requires, as and from being itself.

This is the real ethical state of being. By real ethics I mean awakening oneself into, and as, the cosmological and global network of all things, and so taking on the responsibility to behave as such. It means not falling to the lowest, most violent instincts of the isolated, dying, frantic animal, which is the chaos of so much of our culture, civilization and religion. Much of that chaos is itself a desperate attempt to return to the source of being.

Instead, it means acting with the clarity of one deeply in touch with that root of being, knowing that all these things are what being emerges from. It means seeing through nature’s gleaming, as Hölderlin would say, to the higher thing revealing itself.