Civilizational Cannibalism

Does it feel like our society is crumbling from within? It is — and the real reason isn't the one everyone is arguing about. What makes humans different from every other animal? Not tool use, not language, not theory of mind. One capacity does — simpler and more ordinary than you'd expect — and everything we call civilization is built on it. As it weakens in individuals, the civilization resting on it comes apart. Why now? Institutions consume the individuals they were built to serve; individuals hollow out the institutions they depend on; a political class feeds on both. What if these aren't separate breakdowns but one mechanism — and a civilization that shelters the forces draining it has, in the end, only one thing left to feed on: itself? And then there is artificial intelligence: for the first time, a mind that is not human is acquiring self-interest — without the bonds that tie a living thing's survival to the family and community it depends on. What if that is the true shape of the AI alignment problem, and we've been solving the wrong version of it? Is collapse a fate that befalls a civilization, or the price of a maintenance it stopped paying? The same rules that pull a civilization apart could build one that holds. Civilizational Cannibalism answers these questions from first principles. The same rules turn out to govern a parrot, a person, a machine — and a civilization. Once you see them, you cannot unsee what they tell us about the crisis ahead. Chris Biro has spent more than thirty years studying how behavior actually works — not in a lab, but in the air. One of the world's most experienced free-flight parrot trainers, he has taught more than 500 students across 36 countries and led reintroductions of captive-raised parrots in Brazil and Colombia, documented in peer-reviewed studies co-authored with researchers at Texas A&M University. Before his work with animals he studied electrical engineering, served in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, and founded and ran several companies.