Part 1 was on the OS of my life, Part 2 the professional version, both written in 2022. This one is a little more ambitious – civilisational!
The thought stream started thanks to one of my favourite newsletters, which gave me an insightful metaphor – “Religion is the operating system of a civilisation” – attributed to Rudyard Lynch.
One of the other insights that has taken up quite a lot of space in my mind is courtesy Ernest Becker (via The Worm at the Core) – that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture. Humans apparently invented symbolic systems – everything from soul to religion to nation to art to legacy as a means of managing the terror of death.
That made me wonder if the OS too might have evolved as our mortality buffering strategies changed.
So if I went back to the dawn of humanity, maybe kinship was the OG OS. Blood ties organised protection, food sharing, mating. Your own survival, and genes continuing – the first form of immortality. If you didn’t belong to a group, you didn’t survive – literally or symbolically. Biological immortality.
Then came religion and nation states, scaling this beyond biology. Moral coordination and relatability across thousands who weren’t related. Religion promised eternal life. Nations promised historical permanence. In both OS, the underlying theme was moving from individual mortality through something larger and more lasting. Metaphysical and collective immortality.
Money abstracted it further, letting strangers cooperate across distance, time, and scale. Symbolic immortality that doesn’t require shared blood or shared belief – just the power of a medium of exchange. Legacy through accumulated wealth. Your name on a building, a foundation, a dynasty. Not to mention a longer lifespan these days. Money is the obvious candidate for the modern operating system of civilisation. Material immortality.
So what could be next? Identity, maybe. Not identity as “who am I?” but identity as something that persists. Legacy through ideas, through narrative, through the traces you leave in other minds and systems. The ‘solo’ wave, more and more people ‘creating’, and fewer procreating (dropping fertility rates), all make a case for our shifting from biological/material immortality to narrative immortality.
Beyond that, the more structured and machine-readable identity becomes – think of our conversations with AI constructing our personalities, preferences, patterns – the closer we get to digital permanence. Consciousness upload. That tech bro fever dream of beating death not through theology, but through technology. Transcendence through code. Literally digital immortality.
This is obviously speculative, but I don’t think medieval folks would have imagined that numbers on screens could organise most of human civilisation.
P.S. I found it very curious that this also tracks Maslow’s hierarchy almost perfectly. Kinship solved physiological and safety needs. Religion solved belonging. Money addressed esteem and legacy. Identity maps to self-actualisation, and upload to transcendence. Maybe Maslow was onto something more than individual psychology. Maybe this is the civilisational script – the ladder we’ve been climbing for 10,000+ years, trying to beat death one symbolic system at a time. Damn!
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