Context

The ship is on the rocks. The bottom is falling out of our world. A sense of hopelessness is nestling all around. How should we account for this? What does it mean?

Global institutions and relationships are falling apart. Tariff wars, hot wars, corporate-military strangulation, genocides, shuddering inequality, terrorist threats, the rise of AI, loss of privacy, crises over climate, and all the rest. We have become functionally numb in a state of living crisis. 

A nervous energy envelopes the human race. There is a sense of being hurtled as a species over a cliff towards some inevitable and fast-approaching future, without permission or mandate. As a global community we are in the crucible, the melting pot, with all its pains and traumas. Where is this leading? Why has this happened? And what, if anything, can be done about it?  

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, each is unique, and every one, including yours, is 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: 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, economics, psychology, sci-fi, and politics. But at core the book is a work of political philosophy as it traces and explains 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.