🜂 THE ICARUS EFFECT

When human intelligence flies higher than it can sustain

I. Heritage and Uprooting

We like to think we’re the most intelligent humans in history — that those who came before us were ignorant, primitive, limited.
But what if that’s not true?
What if their brains were just as capable as ours?
What if the only thing that sets us apart is the context… and the illusion of superiority?

A Homo sapiens from 100,000 years ago already had a brain like yours. Same capacity for language, planning, and symbolism. No phone. No Google. No GPS. But they knew how to survive without any of that. They could navigate by the stars, track an animal for days, tell poisonous plants from healing ones. They knew how to cooperate with their tribe, read the weather in the clouds, sense danger in a single crack of a branch. And above all, they knew how to be in their body, in their environment, in the present.

You, in their environment, probably wouldn’t last a week. They survived for millennia, shaping —through their decisions, their instinct, and their intelligence— the very context you now take for granted.
We, with all our technology, panic the moment we lose signal.

We are still tribal animals with hunter-gatherer brains, yet we live in a world designed by and for algorithms, global markets, and megacities.
And many of our current crises —anxiety, alienation, polarization, disinformation— may not be system failures, but symptoms of a deep evolutionary mismatch.

Our ancestors survived the wild. We survive what we’ve domesticated: schedules, platforms, regulations, screens. The paradox is that today, the greatest threat to our species is not the environment — it’s ourselves: our ideas, our tools, and our inability to manage them ethically over the long term.

Abstraction made us dominant, but it also uprooted us. We are children of imagination… but orphans of the world that shaped us. It’s not that we’re “more” or “better”: we’re decontextualized animals — with tribal brains operating on global networks, godlike technology, and the emotional wisdom of teenagers.

Can we recover instinct without giving up thought?

II. Wings of wax

We’re not more intelligent — we just think differently. Faster. Further. More abstractly. Abstraction allowed us to build worlds that don’t exist: religions, currencies, ideologies, algorithms, futures. And those worlds gave us wings. But they also pulled us away from the ground. We lost instinct. Connection. The body.

Each generation of humans has wanted to reach higher. But as we climb, the vertigo grows too. We no longer understand what we’re doing, how the systems that govern us work, or who controls the world we’ve built.

A civilization driven by ideas it can no longer control. That’s the Icarus effect: we soar thanks to thought, but the higher we climb, the more we’re burned by the sun of our own inventions.

But this alarm is not new. It has been sounding for centuries, ignored time and again. During the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites were already smashing machines — not out of fear of progress, but because of what they saw coming: the loss of control, of dignity, of autonomy.

Then came thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who warned that technology is not neutral — it imposes its own logic, and once unleashed, no one stops it.

And later, Ted Kaczynski —known as the Unabomber— took that critique to the extreme: not as a madman, but as a brilliant mathematician who saw in technological expansion an irreversible process of dehumanization and control. His methods were condemnable. His diagnosis, uncomfortably accurate.

"If we don’t set limits to what we create, what we create will end up setting them for us."

III. The god of growth

Like Icarus, we fly, fascinated by the sun… forgetting that our wings are made of wax. And in that reckless flight, one idea took hold as fuel: infinite growth.

Progress stopped being a tool to improve life and became an end in itself. Along with it came an economic and cultural model that turned acceleration into a virtue and consumption into an identity.

Capitalism —and its latest version, neoliberalism— didn’t just organize markets: it reorganized our way of being in the world. It taught us that everything must move faster, produce more, be worth more, cost more. That resting is losing, that stopping is failing, and that being enough is the same as being nothing.

Thus, the link between intelligence and survival was replaced by a much more fragile one: the link between intelligence and productivity, and productivity and value.

That model, while profitable, is not sustainable.

Our ancestors knew when to stop. We only know how to accelerate. And maybe that’s the true sign of decline: not the lack of intelligence, but the inability to sustain it without breaking ourselves.

This isn’t about going back to the caves. Nor about rejecting intelligence.
It’s about recognizing that flying without direction isn’t freedom — it’s a fall.

IV. Global Circus

This neoliberal model that lives us — because we no longer live it, we just inhabit it without questioning — may be profitable, but it’s not sustainable.
And instead of slowing down, we turn it into a spectacle.

A show titled “Infinite Progress™”.

Hosted by Elon Musk,
who promises to take us to Mars… while his rockets run on layoffs here on Earth and memes on “X” that no one asked for.

Opening act: Donald Trump, showman of patriotic hyperconsumption — “Make Jobs Great Again.”
The punchline? Tariffs that wipe out the farms of his own voters and record-breaking public debt.
But hey, the red hats fly off the shelves.
Made in China, of course.

Special guest: Benjamin Netanyahu,
selling absolute security in exchange for a perpetual war — one that keeps both his citizens and their neighbors from sleeping without sirens.

And from the Southern Cone, Javier Milei — the rockstar of anarcho-capitalism:
chainsaw in hand, promising total freedom… except for the people going from state subsidies to supermarkets with prices that look like the Nasdaq.

They all share more than just fiery speeches or magical solutions:
they’ve learned that chaos polarizes — and polarization builds loyalty.
That dividing is more profitable than persuading.
That confrontation creates spectacle, and spectacle brings votes.

Paradoxically, their fans are almost always the first to realize that the party of infinite growth comes at a cost:
farmers losing their markets, workers paying for the Mars rocket with their severance check, middle classes funding “freedom” through interplanetary inflation.

Moral of the story?
When profit is the only god, satire stops being a literary genre and becomes public policy.
And while we laugh sharing the meme, we vote for the jester, fund the tycoon, and applaud the executioner.
All for a front-row seat… to watch the stage burn.

V. Closing

Do you really think we’re heading somewhere meaningful?
Or are we just flooring the gas pedal on a highway with no map — but with Wi-Fi?
Are we still progressing… or just updating the wreckage in high definition?
Who’s designing the future? And why does it always look like a video game where your only roles are to pay, vote badly, or subscribe?
Are we truly freer… or do we just have more passwords?

Maybe we don’t need to turn the machines off. It might be enough to stop acting like one.

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(Published by URBAWAKE - urbawake.com)