We live in a tightly interlocked, world-spanning system. It didn’t just happen. It’s a choice we made. Collectively. We didn’t make it for millions of years, but then we made it. Collectively, iteratively, continuously through thousands of years.
We settled. We began to rely on each other. On our family, on our nearest neighbors, on people in the same town, in the same region, in the same country. It turned out to be a relief. Suddenly we didn’t have to do everything on our own. Suddenly there were people, who had the time and were given the resources to specialize, to learn what nobody had learned before, to achieve what nobody had been able to even imagine.
This is, what civilization looks like. Reliance on each other to the extreme.
Yes, we tried our shortcuts. Instead of making things, we took them from other people. Crime and war are detrimental to civilization, but we never got rid of them. Somehow they are in human nature, but history shows us a path to progress. Making errors, overcoming them, ever and ever again, we have come far. There is no reason to believe this can’t go on. We just have to remember how we started and what it means to build a civilization.
It’s incremental. You learn to build on what you’ve learned, you learn to build on what you’ve built. We now have machines to build machines to build trains and ships and cars to transport what we need to build machines. Many an intermediate step gets forgotten. It’s not needed at our current level of technology and infrastructure, but if civilization ever fails, those gaps in knowledge will hurt us terribly.
Civilization is a choice we’ve once made, but now it is a process. We can’t go back to where we were before, and we couldn’t possibly recover civilization if it ever failed globally. Our only chance is, to maintain it carefully.