Revisiting The War Against Nature (March 2025): Conditioning, Trauma, and the Collapse of Conceptual Reality

Editor's note: What follows is a reviewed and expanded version of an essay first drafted in March 2025. At that time, I wrote intuitively about the sickness of civilization. And how conditioning hijacks the nervous system and how concepts become cages. Since then, my ongoing research has connected those intuitions to neuroscience, trauma studies, and systems theory. This version retains the spirit of the original while integrating scientific evidence and anthropological context.

A World Built on Overlays

The world is sick. This is not a metaphor; it is observable. The structures we create and the ideologies we defend run against the grain of biological intelligence. Civilization is less a system of truth than a lattice of conceptual overlays. And abstractions so rigid they override our capacity for direct perception.

Enlightenment, properly understood, is not acquisition but subtraction: the peeling away of distortions. Concepts are tools, not reality. They guide navigation but should never replace experience. Yet modern life demands that we inhabit concepts as if they were more real than bodies, seasons, or ecosystems.

The Nervous System and the Hijack of Bio-intelligence

The nervous system is our interface with reality. It regulates arousal, learning, and belonging. When intact, it keeps us synchronized with rhythms of day and season, group and ecology. But modern systems hijack this interface.

What science shows:

• Chronic stress dysregulates circuitry: Neuroscientists like Bruce McEwen called this allostatic load: the wear-and-tear from living in permanent fight-or-flight. Cortisol floods shrink the hippocampus (memory/context), enlarge the amygdala (fear), and impair the prefrontal cortex (executive function) (McEwen, 1998).
• Trauma transmits across generations. Rachel Yehuda's work with Holocaust survivors and their children shows altered cortisol responses inherited epigenetically. (Yehuda,2015)
• Cultures encode wounds. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart's model of historical trauma describes how colonization and dispossession becomes collective scars, transmitted through narrative, identity, and health outcomes.

The personal symptoms are familiar: chronic stress, autoimmune disorders, anxiety, depression, dissociation, addiction. The civilization symptoms look similar: polarization, brittle institutions, collective hyper-vigilance, numbing consumption, ritualized re-enactments of past violence.

The Myth of Progress: When Trauma Masquerades as Evolution

"Progress" is the story we tell ourselves to justify overshoot. But look closely:

• Medicine expands, yet disease burdens rise. Chronic illness and mental health disorders climb even as pharmaceutical capacity grows.
• Digital connectivity deepens disconnection. Loneliness has reached epidemic levels despite ubiquitous platforms (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015)
• Economic growth conceals nervous system collapse. Wealth accumulates on paper while emotional resilience, social trust, and ecological integrity erode.
• Longer lives, lower quality. Lifespan expands while health span contracts; survival without thriving.

Joseph Tainter showed in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) that every civilization faces diminishing returns to complexity: maintenance costs outpace surplus. What looks like progress is often a trauma strategy. More control, more rigidity, more over-coupling = masking fragility.

Collapse as Biological Correction

In system dynamics, collapse is not anomaly but overshoot correction (Forrester, 1971). In biology, stress reactions that once ensured survival become destructive when constant. Collapse is the body of Earth rejecting maladaptive rigidity.

From a non-dual vantage: flow always reasserts itself. Trauma freezes flow into doctrines, debts, and identities. Collapse is simply flow breaking the freeze.

Mechanisms of Nervous System Hijack

The means are now systemic:

1. Artificial fear cycles (media and politics sustain hypervigilicance).
2. Nutritional depletion (ultra-processed diets undermine regulation).
3. Conceptual overload (information exceeds capacity for integration).
4. Conditioning from childhood (obedience over perception).
5. Over stimulation (notifications, noise, 24/7 environments).
6. Suppression of natural cycles (circadian disruption, no rest).
7. Lack of ritual repair (no collective mourning, no forgiveness).

Spirituality Is Not Exempt

Even spiritual systems often reproduce trauma's freeze: hierarchy, elitism, bypass disguised as detachment. When myth ossifies into doctrine, it ceases to metabolize suffering and begins to perpetuate it. True spirituality is not escape but clarity: seeing through overlays into direct reality.

Healing: From Trauma OS to Nervous System Coherence

Judith Herman outlined the sequence for trauma recovery: safety, regulation, integration. At scale, the same principles apply:

• Safety: ecological and social buffers; redundancy in food, energy, care. Polycentric governance (Ostrom, 1990) so local units can act without paralysis.
• Regulation: align work and school with circadian cycles; restore daylight, movement, rest; treat care infrastructure as essential as roads.
• Integration: sunset laws and debt jubilees (engineered forgetting); plural histories; rituals of release and mourning.
• Identity-safe updating: make revision honorable; reward dissent and correction.
• Slack as design principle: cap efficiency with resilience floors.

This is not utopianism; it is systems hygiene. Donella Meadows (1999) called these leverage points: redesigning rules, feedbacks, and paradigms so systems bend instead of break.

The Return to What Was Always There

For ~95% of our species’ history, humans lived in forager rhythms: cycles, small groups, embodied work, ritual repair, plural story. These weren’t primitive morals; they were nervous-system ergonomics.

Collapse, then, is not the apocalypse, it is the correction. Trauma’s freeze breaks; flow returns. Healing is not invention but remembrance: to live once more aligned with cycles, bodies, and reality itself.

Nature always wins. The nervous system, too, seeks coherence. The only question is whether collapse becomes a deeper trauma or..... the therapy we were too rigid to choose.