Page 66 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire
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Homeostatopia
be one and all charlatans, exploiters, participants without
fundamental commitment to anything, along for the ride to get what
they could from the organization. So I concluded nothing: these folks
probably ran the gamut from cynics to psychopaths, same as the
general population.
Homeostatopia’s rise and fall is familiar to students of recent
human folly. I need not elaborate on the specific points at which it
went awry—one or two things I did find of interest, however. The
first is the fantasy that the power of man’s intellect can invent a
system capable of success independent of the weakness of man’s
intellect. Nature does not need us, arriving at its creative generation
of the cosmos through unwavering physical law; having discovered
those principles, we conclude that we can also produce structures
indifferent to our foibles. Folklore is filled with cautionary tales
against striving for capabilities beyond reasonable expectation—
Icarus, Faust, the sorcerer’s apprentice. But just as many, if not more,
stories told to children and adults promise pie in the sky or heaven
on Earth; these fairy tales might function to develop hope and
determination—sacrifice and virtue will be rewarded, magic beans
grow into pots of gold—or serve to keep the poor in their place.
The purveyors of utopia themselves can be transformed by
success or failure into less attractive personalities, right under the
noses of their unsuspecting acolytes. Hal Peña might have fallen prey
to idolization, if he’d risen far enough to be idolized. But his plan had
the inevitable flaw, the miscalculation that sinks the ship, the blind
spot hidden by ambition: his model of diffusion was unable to
support the weight of upward scaling. According to dispassionate
analysts of the nuts-and-bolts of Homeostatopia, Peña was counting
on the phenomenon of viral marketing to spread its solar energy
package. In that mechanical dynamic identical units are supposed to
reproduce themselves, like a static virus, through infection, hijacking
resources and constant reproduction. All it takes to get rolling is a
few susceptible and influential carriers; then progress is rapid and
exponential. It spreads through space with minimal time, each cell of
the virus being identical to and of no greater weight or value than the
others. If, as Peña expected, the value of getting off the grid would
be obvious and the necessity to pass on the package almost
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