The Processes That Shaped Our World

Life runs on feedback loops. Not destiny. Not heroes. Loops.

My mtDNA results cut through the noise of nationalism and identity branding. They point to the root code: where survival patterns were written into bodies and carried forward. If you want to grasp Rome’s violence, Sumer’s fall, or patriarchy’s grip, you don’t start with modern headlines. You start with Africa. That’s the operating system. Everything else is a skin.

Africa: The Root Code

Every human alive carries the echo of one woman in Africa. Not a myth. A body. A life surrounded by drought, predators, and unstable food webs. Survival ran on specific programs:

• Scarcity primed vigilance. Notice more. Trust less. Conserve energy.
• Predation calibrated collective behavior. Alone, you die. Together, you might live.
• Variable climate wired flexibility. Move when the land can’t feed you. Innovate when the tool stops working.

Hard truth: much of what we call “human nature” — craving, empathy, suspicion, dominance — is not essence. It’s adaptive software written under threat. Useful then. Context-risky now.

Migration: My Line Moves North

My line traveled north: Nile corridor, Levantine hinge, Balkan doorways. Each stop added loops that stuck because they worked.

• Scarcity → movement → conflict → hierarchy. When food is thin, someone decides who eats first.
• Seed → harvest → ritual → repeat. Agriculture codifies cycles into rites, calendars, and punishments.
• Track → feast → scarcity → myth. Boom-bust food cycles birth stories that manage behavior and justify rules.

No nobility. No decadence. Just systems that reproduced themselves. My foremothers ran households inside these constraints. Bodies as leverage. Endurance as inheritance.

Bronze Age: H1aa Emerges (~2100 BCE)

Somewhere in the Balkans, as trade webs frayed and climate regimes shifted, a woman carried a small change in the mitochondrial script: H1aa. She is the matriline to which I’m attached.

Her environment was collapse-aware:

• Tin and copper routes disrupted → tool uncertainty.
• Palace economies faltered → hyper-local survival.
• Mobility plus seasonal farming → mixed strategies that kept children alive.

The loop was pragmatic: bind food cycles to movement and alliances. Endure the strongman when you must. Make kin where you can. The brutal truth: survival for women often meant submission inside patriarchal bargains. But the line did not break. That’s why I am here.

Scaling Up: From Households to Empires

When households scaled into cities and empires, loops metastasized.

• Irrigation → bureaucracy → rigidity → collapse. Water control simplifies abundance until drought exposes the brittleness.
• Kinship loyalty → conquest rationalized → patriarchy formalized. The “inside” is protected by subjugating an “outside.”
• Hunger for land → ship technology → extractive empire. Distance blurs empathy. Violence becomes efficient.

In Europe, women of H1aa moved through feudal rents, plague shocks, and church discipline. The loop remained: adapt → endure → transmit. Techniques for keeping children alive passed hand to hand, even as institutions disciplined bodies and absorbed labor.

Hard truth: colonization wasn’t a moral innovation of the 1500s. It was ancient scarcity, fear, and domination scaled with ships, gunpowder, and accounting.

Industrial Acceleration: Loops on Fossil Fuel

Coal and oil did not invent new human motives. They amplified old ones.

• Energy windfall → surplus → population and complexity spikes.
• Time discipline → factory cadence → nervous system compression.
• Global price signals → local disintegration → dependency.

Empire became logistics. Patriarchy re-skinned as “household efficiency” and “scientific management.” The rituals of survival morphed into routines of productivity. Same loops. Faster clock.

Today: The Loops Clash in a Northern Flatland

I sit in the Netherlands, an H1aa node under LED skies and just-in-time shelves. Legacy loops that protected my foremothers can wreck me now if left on autopilot.

• Scarcity logic → consumer hoarding and financial anxiety.
• Patriarchal hierarchy → systemic violence at work and home, justified as “order.”
• Ritual repetition without meaning → empty routines that numb instead of nourish.

My anger at patriarchy isn’t an abstraction. It’s embodied memory. These loops lived in the bodies of my foremothers as bargaining strategies with danger. They worked then. They malfunction now.

How Loops Work: A Short Field Guide

• Stocks: things that accumulate. Calories, debt, trust, trauma.
• Flows: rates that fill or drain stocks. Income, sleep, attention, affection.
• Delays: lags between action and effect. You overshoot because the feedback arrives late.
• Reinforcing loops: success breeds success, or harm compounds harm. Compulsion, compound interest, cascading care.
• Balancing loops: systems push back toward a set point. Thermoregulation, social sanction, rest.

You change reality by changing flows, shortening delays, or re-aiming the set points. Morals are weak against structure. Structure wins.

Hacking the Loops: Leverage That Actually Moves Things

Freedom isn’t outside the system. It’s inside, at leverage points.

• Breath to cut the fear–reaction loop
  • Practice: 6 slow exhales before replying, buying, or scrolling. Train the pause. The pause is leverage.
• Recode ritual from obedience to coherence
  • Practice: dawn and dusk anchoring. Light, water, movement, one line of intention. Make the day rhythmic, not rigid.
• Rewrite myth from dominance to reciprocity
  • Practice: audit your personal pantheon. Which stories reward conquest? Replace with ones that reward guardianship, repair, and mutual thriving.
• Shift the set point of “enough”
  • Practice: define sufficiency in calories, clothes, cash, and clicks. Write the number. Close loops at “enough,” not at “more.”
• Redirect reinforcing loops toward care
  • Practice: compounding kindness. 10 minutes of relational repair daily. Interest accrues in trust.
• Shorten harmful delays
  • Practice: weekly review of inputs → state. Track two metrics only: sleep hours and post-input mood. Connect cause to effect faster.
• Change information flows
  • Practice: block low-quality signals, open channels to grounded sources and bodies around you. What you see, you become.
• Rewire identity to process, not performance
  • Practice: “I am the one who repairs.” Identities that tie to action create feedback you can improve.

This isn’t self-help veneer. It’s OS work.

Patriarchy as a System, Not a Villain

• Resource bottlenecks + defense needs → male-coalitional violence rewarded.
• Lineage and property transfer → control of women’s reproduction.
• Institutionalization → law, liturgy, and labor codes that sediment the control.

Dislodging it requires structural counters:

• Resource sovereignty at household and community scales.
• Reproductive autonomy and social protection.
• Rituals that honor women’s agency and men’s care labor.
• Legal and economic scaffolds that reward cooperation and penalize predation.

Anger is fuel. Structure is the engine.

Colonization: Extraction Wrapped in Story

Three core loops:

• Distance → dehumanization → violence → profit → ideology to launder it.
• Mapping and measurement → enclosure → taxation → dependency.
• Missionary certainty → cultural overwrite → elite intermediaries → stratification.

Decolonization as loop work:

• Relink cause and effect. Who pays the cost for your comfort?
• Relocalize competence. Food, fixing, first aid, neighbor ties.
• Re-ritualize belonging without supremacy. Ceremony that binds care, not conquest.

A Note on mtDNA and Myth

mtDNA is a matriline marker. It tells one thread of the story, not the whole cloth. It’s powerful for memory and meaning-making, and limited for total ancestry. Hold both truths: use the signal as a mythic anchor and stay honest about scope. Evidence and story can be allies if you label them.

• Evidence lane: genetics, archaeology, climate proxies, written records.
• Myth lane: identity, responsibility, orientation. Name it as myth. Use it as compass, not cudgel.

Practices: Daily, Weekly, Seasonal

• Daily
  • Breath gate before action
  • Nourish before numb: protein, salt, water before sugar or screens
  • One act of repair: body, tool, relationship, land
• Weekly
  • Loop audit: what reinforced? what balanced? what delayed?
  • Financial and food flows: match inputs to enough
  • Movement circuit that trains steadiness, not spectacle
• Seasonal
  • Threshold rites at solstices and equinoxes
  • Wardrobe and tools reset: mend, gift, replace with intention
  • Ancestral remembrance: name, thank, release what no longer fits

Rituals are software updates. Run them consciously.

Code and Choice

I am not destiny. I am feedback.

My H1aa line proves that survival is repetition that worked. But what worked then doesn’t necessarily work now. The real inheritance isn’t trauma. It’s adaptive capacity — the ability to sense, to update, to choose which loops to keep and which to burn.

History is not a parade of great men. It’s loops. Brutal, recursive, effective. And today, the code is visible.

The question is simple and it is mine to answer every day: do I keep running it, or do I rewrite it?