Our Great Filter

The Transition from Accumulation to Reformulation

The universe is a big place. It’s also really old. It seems reasonable to think that millions of planets like Earth could have developed life, and complex life, millions or even billions of years ago. If we assume such a technological head start would allow these beings to travel all through space, then… where are they? This is the Fermi paradox, named after the Italian-American physicist and creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, Enrico Fermi. Contemplating this question has led to many imaginative answers. The theory I’d like use to frame this article holds that star-faring civilizations may not arise because a creeping threat looms over all “advanced” civilizations, one that—perhaps inevitably—spells their doom. This civilizational sword of Damocles is known as the Great Filter.

I think of the Great Filter every time I learn more about resource crises, brinksmanship in power politics, and seemingly intractable cultural and psychological friction. I’ll admit: thinking that I live in a time when not only my country, but my species and even all multi-cellular life, is on the line is not comfortable. Yet considering the problems and mysteries I confront daily in global issues, relationships, and even my personal development in the context of the Great Filter brings me a practical source of peace and acceptance: the sentiment that it makes perfect sense the problems we are going through now, as people and as societies.

So often, we recoil from the problems we find in the world, and in ourselves. We can’t believe things are the way they are. They should not be this way. In fact, there are reasons why the world is the way it is, why we are the way we are. In counseling, I’ve been learning recently about the importance of accepting emotions, and on a larger scale the Great Filter is a concept that helps me accept the tenuous positions I and the rest of my kind find ourselves in each day. Just as with personal acceptance, moving to a frame of being curious why things are as they as, as opposed to rejecting them outright, gives us new eyes we can use to immediately begin to improve our situation.

On the wide scale, what the concept of the Great Filter asks of us is the following: can we confront and overcome the challenges we feel rising all around us? To find out, are we truly willing to do whatever it takes to survive and flourish, or are we too beholden to established ways of thinking and regulating our inner experience? It’s important to note that there can be multiple great filters. What’s most important now is overcoming our current set of existential challenges, and yet this will surely lead us to another set. This is something else we ought to accept, just as each day brings us new challenges on the personal scale. Aren’t challenges what keep life interesting?

The current set of foundational challenges I see us confronting are these:

1) Escalating resource shortages and climate disruption caused by our ways of life on a natural world we can no longer take for granted

2) So-called “Great Power Conflict” which threatens to destroy our chances at decent life

3) The blowback and illegitimacy which arise from physical violence and material deprivation

4) The psychic fragility of order, arising from the neglected psychical violence done to those within the power structure

Overcoming any one of these goals would represent the biggest accomplishment ever for our kind. Yet these are the kinds of things we must achieve in the near future if any of us individually is to have a life at all, much less a decent life or a life of flourishing. The greatest challenge facing us is that of finding new ways of thinking and feeling, and having these new ways be appealing and genuinely beneficial to the broad base of humanity, not only the especially forward-thinking. I call the great transition of our time the transition from a fundamental logic of accumulation to a logic of reformulation.

Accumulation is the basic mode of what we call civilization. It represents the gathering together of people, agricultural surplus, information, and weapons into centers of power which exist to protect against competing centers of power, and to destroy them if it is deemed necessary or advantageous.

For a long time, it seemed like the logic of accumulation could proceed forever. Throughout the 20th century, centers of power vied for world domination. The United States emerged from that century as a center of power having reached a state of “critical mass,” or imperviousness to most existential threats which plagued previous centers of power. The rise of China, however, represents the emergence of a second center of power in the state of critical mass. With this event, accumulation has hit its limit. Going forward, the risks of accumulation are growing and its rewards grow more fleeting. This is because we are leveraging technology which is becoming more powerful and unpredictable all the time, and because the psychic costs we would like to ignore are mounting and creating instability at all points in the power structure.

The only way to escape from the 21st century is by changing our civilizational orientation from accumulation to reformulation. If accumulation is a gathering-together, reformulation is the looking over what we have gathered with new eyes and finding imaginative uses for it beyond the logics we followed to accumulate it in the first place.

The tools that allow the attainment of a certain level are not necessarily the ones that will allow further attainment. In all areas accumulation is suffering from its own success. Centers of power confront others they cannot easily attack or defend themselves from. People find themselves with full bank accounts and empty hearts. Landfills overflow with food as millions starve. Solving these problems is not a question of accumulating more, but of using what we already have in a better way.

Reformulation is something that can be done on any scale, from reconsidering how to spend an afternoon to contemplating shifts in grand strategy. And so the responsibility and opportunity in bridging this largest (so far) of historical transitions lies in each of us. We owe it to those who came before who struggled so hard to give us the present moment. We owe it to each other, as we become more and more like soldiers on a battlefield fighting for those around us.

And we owe it to ourselves, not only because the civilizational challenges gathered under the concept of the Great Filter threaten each of our lives and psychical well-being, but because it is a shame for any of us to leave this planet without seeing the beauty, strength, and creativity of which we are capable.

Writing Assistant for this article: Vickie Davis