Context

Why are we knowingly degrading our global community? Why are we playing games over it? Why are elite-led answers to world problems grubby at best? What happened to democracy?

There is a growing number of people around the world who are becoming disenchanted with global politics. They are realising that the establishment is in the pocket of finance, the 1980s were a generational sell-out, the current answers are weak and corporate-led, the economics are a stitch-up, and even the choices in elections seem narrow and depressingly hollow. A passive and implicit understanding is spreading that our world has gone wrong, that the ship is on the rocks, and that our leaders are helping friends and fortunes rather than the common good. It’s a world of smoke and mirrors, obfuscation, and sleight of hand.

Why?

And why does it matter?

Concept

You are a member of a humanity - one of countless many across the cosmos. And your life is more significant than you think. Your humanity is a governing species, ruling the planetary host of Earth. All humanities dominate their hosts, all are unique, and all, including yours, are on a quest for self-actualisation – re-birth in self-mastered form. What drives this is The Tension Dynamic. It is an odyssey of growth, struggle, pain, glory, betrayal, and incredible cruelty.

Your life is part of a force that is patterning humankind. The rhythms are happening now. And they are happening across numerous host worlds too.

If you are curious about the significance of your species, if you wonder why humanity is ruining its home, if you ponder what it’s all for, then read The Tension Dynamic.

It will transform how you see your world.

Book

The Tension Dynamic is a work of political philosophy, laying out the widest possible canvas to observe the human condition. It posits a theory as to why and how we as a species have come to be in the precarious position we are today. The book is a cogent illustration of that theory and the philosophical model is set out in fable that is accessible. At the heart of the analysis are two countervailing forces, the dominance drive and the conscious corrective. Together in dialectic they power our race forward, as they do all human races on all celestial hosts across the cosmos. Each chapter uses a different species to explore the next link in the chain of human development, allowing patterns to be charted and the familiar to be assessed in new ways.

The Tension Dynamic operates through any and every ruling race and its look and feel differs across the cosmos, depending on the temperament of the ruling species and the conditions and resources on offer. No celestial host is visited twice, and no chapter repeats a period, as the book snapshots a governing species during its singular traverse from birth to re-birth over hundreds of thousands of its years. A rich and colourful range of hosts and planetary conditions offer backdrop for the odyssey, with all manner of species featuring as a humanity: pigs, birds, bees, snails, dogs, frogs, ants, and, of course, apes.

The reader is invited to work out exactly where our own species presently is on this cosmic journey. As the pages of the book turn, the patterns of our past slip into familiar futures of big data, nanotechnologies and AI, only played out in alien worlds.

Crucial questions that define our own age are explored and explained: Will our technologies free us or kill us? Why do populations no longer stir enough fear in their powerful? How important are myths in shaping our reality? And why, in a world of grotesque inequality, do we insist on pampering elites?

The Tension Dynamic is at once history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, sci-fi, and politics. But at core the book is a work of political philosophy as it traces the patterns of human power and imagines their expression across celestial hosts. 

With the exception of chapter 13, all characters and scenarios are the product of applied imagination. The Tension Dynamic is essentially a thought experiment. It is a meditation on our humanity at this crucial point in its development.