The Path to the Singularity: An Ideological History

This paper traces the deep historical and philosophical currents that have propelled human civilisation toward a ”Resource Entropy Singularity”1 —a point of no return where the biophysical demands of the global economy overwhelm and irreversibly degrade the planetary systems upon which we depend. This crisis is often viewed through a purely material lens, as a failure of technology, overpopulation, or poor resource management (Meadows et al., 1972). I argue, however, that its roots are fundamentally ideological, originating in a series of historical-philosophical breaks that systematically and deliberately redefined humanity’s relationship with the natural world (White, 1967) and, crucially, with the laws of thermodynamics.

This trajectory was not inevitable. It was the result of a specific worldview winning out over others, violently suppressing them, and then formalising its own assumptions into a supposedly ”rational” and ”scientific” system that rendered its own foundations invisible. This analysis traces this ideology from its mythological origins to its modern-day entrenchment, arguing that the current crisis is not a technical problem, but the logical end-point of a civilisational ”operating system” (Daly, 1991) that is fundamentally at war with thermodynamic and biophysical reality.  This analysis begins by locating the ”original sin” of this trajectory not in a physical act, but in the foundational mythology of the West: the parable of Eden.