The Paperclip Civilization: The Original Sin and Genealogy of Collapse

This 59-minute episode combines two essays into one genealogy of civilizational collapse.The first fracture is vertical: the West lost its telos. Christianity bundled sacred meaning with falsifiable physical claims about cosmology, history, and nature. When science falsified the physics, the meaning structure shattered with it. Into the void rushed utility: the low-bandwidth metric that bureaucracies, markets, and institutions could count.The second fracture is horizontal: the West lost its “we.” From Ockham’s nominalism through Hobbes, Locke, the Marginal Revolution, and Bentham, relational reality dissolved into isolated individuals optimizing private utility.Together, these collapses produced the paperclip civilization: a system that no longer knows what life is for, and no longer has the relational substrate to coordinate a replacement. It optimizes GDP, QALYs, engagement, safety, and comfort while consuming the civilizational substrate that made those metrics possible.The episode ends with the escape problem: meaning must be rebuilt without rebundling it to falsifiable claims, and relational reality must be restored without returning to obsolete metaphysics. The alternative is training superintelligence on the output of a civilization already optimizing itself into collapse.https://kunnas.com/articles/the-original-sin-of-historyhttps://kunnas.com/articles/genealogy-of-collapse