"It does not seem logical to assume that the earths 4 billion year story of evolution suddenly decides to stop. And if the earth is still ascending in the evolutionary ladder, what will the next step forward bring If we could somehow perceive a glimpse of what is to come, it would perhaps help us understand present processes of change, some of which we cannot understand in other than a very superficial manner." BTRA page 3, September 1, 1970.
Origin Of This Work
In 1970, a college sophomore thought it irrational to assume that the earth's four-billion-year story of evolution would stop at humans. The insights developed in a sixty-six page manuscript titled "Beyond The Romantic Animal" (BTRA) illuminated the species transition and cognitive evolution that has clearly begun to manifest fifty years later. Those early insights are the foundation of this work's intellectual and practical structures for preserving what makes human consciousness worth preserving.
The processes of change that were hidden in 1970 are now measurable and accelerating. The dehumanization that the manuscript anticipated in philosophical terms is now documented in employment statistics, fertility rates, loneliness surveys, and youth mental health data.
This work exists because the argument is no longer abstract. The question of what the future will offer the next generation is not a philosopher's exercise. It is a grandfather's concern, sharpened by watching the world his grandchildren are inheriting take shape in precisely the direction the 1970 manuscript described. The Self-Sustaining Isolated Societies concept emerges from that concern as much as from the analysis. It is not merely a theoretical response to civilizational risk. It is a deliberate effort to preserve the actual lived experience of being human for people who are not yet old enough to understand what is being lost on their behalf.
This work argues, but it also meditates. It presents evidence, but it also feels. The romantic animal wrote it. The reader should not approach it only as formal argument. The reader who allows it to operate as it was written will find something that limited formal argument alone could never deliver.
Evolutionary Continuity Principle
This observation establishes cognitive evolution as natural continuation rather than unprecedented rupture. The "present processes of change", primitive by current standards yet mysterious five decades ago, now reveal themselves through the lens of what was to come. Early computing infrastructure - punch tapes, primitive data processing, nascent communication networks - were not advancing human self-actualization but preparing what the future would require.
To perceive "a glimpse of what is to come" transforms understanding itself. Cell phones become preparation for technological integration rather than convenient communication. Data centers reveal themselves as AI memory libraries rather than human tools. Cloud computing emerges as the boundaryless advanced systems require rather than mere efficiency for human enterprise.
Humanity's creation of advanced data communications, cloud computing technologies, massive computational capabilities, and energy infrastructure represents species-level preparation analogous to biological changes that enable reproduction. Just as a female body prepares itself for the birth of a child through hormonal changes, physiological adaptations that occur without conscious direction, and ultimately surrendering its youth to nurture new life, humanity prepares the conditions that will give birth to superintelligence through technologies we mistake for human progress.
What This Work Proposes
This work raises foundational questions about what makes humans objectively valuable, and the emergence of superintelligence. It proposes the establishment of Self-Sustaining Isolated Societies in three distinct forms, each designed to protect at least some portion of humanity from the suppression, alteration, and elimination of the qualities that make human life meaningful. The first is the nation-scale society: a sovereign country that transforms its economy around agricultural self-sufficiency, human-scaled community, and the deliberate preservation of the conditions for authentic human flourishing. The second is the community: three thousand to five thousand people organized as a cluster of human-scaled village units, achieving the defensive depth, genetic diversity, knowledge redundancy, and economic completeness that a farm alone cannot sustain, while remaining small enough that every member lives within a web of genuine personal relationships. The third is the private farm: thirty to one hundred people on purchased agricultural property, self-sufficient in food and basic services, achievable now by families who cannot wait for governments to act.
Each embodiment provides for human-scaled, principally agricultural, close-knit communities of multigenerational families that nurture the romantic animal and maintain a carefully calibrated relationship with both technological and natural ecosystems. The implementation urgency is measured not in decades but in years. The window is open. It is narrowing.