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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