Ancient Wrong Turns ― and ― a New Language of History

A sensitive view of Civilization’s cultural divisions causing recurring Growth-to-Collapse at its peak.

Authors

Keywords:

natural systems, organizational continuity, emergence, take-off, & landing, experiential signals, growing up, mental & material, stories

Abstract

New systems science tools allow retracing the continuity of complex system emergence, development stages, and behaviors, enabling a more, can I say “intimate” understanding of the various nested or autonomous systems in an environment. Here the subject is the discovery of how the recurring systemic “growth-to-collapse” pattern exhibited by our major Western Civilizations, from the first, unnamed except for its collapse, Babel, to the present systemically very similar case of ‘Us.’ Due to the vast scope of the subject and new methods being used, a common language “story-form” of system identification and references to the features natural system continuity in development are used; the normal continuities of takeoff to landing for organizational processes found in emergent natural systems and their internal and external designs and behavior.

That focus here is on the strange well intended great misconception on which our fully intentional growth-to-collapse world economic model was designed, and we inherited. It comes from a very  easy error, of trying to perfect endless compound economic growth, relying on the brilliant creative designs of the well-intentioned late Stone Age peoples we descended from. Like many other philosophies before. That the human error involved, having pride in great successes, that turn out to blind people to the contexts of their work, is hopefully that’s a more practical problem to solve, accepting our natural place in nature as the first step.

Author Biography

Jessie Lydia Henshaw, HDS natural systems design science

Jessie’s work is published in research papers, her RNS journal of research reports, and her archive of experiments. She was born in 1946, grew up in Hamilton, NY, and now lives in New York City.   She received a 1968 B.S. in physics from St. Lawrence University, followed by postgraduate study in mathematics at Stony Brook and Columbia, and then a 1974 MFA in architecture, landscape, and microclimate design from the Univ. of Pennsylvania. Her many years of independent systems field research began when she moved to Denver and made her first important findings on the natural organizational designs of systems as developed during growth, while studying the natural microclimates of homes. She has since continued to accumulate a body of useful new work.  

The early inspiration for her research was noticing, in freshman physics, that equations for change over time were typically made by clipping off the irregular transition data at the beginning and end, where the natural processes of system formation and change occur, a funny surprise joked about at first, becoming shocking once seen as blinding physics to the **organizational ** not mathematical, nature of systems. 

Publication: https://www.synapse9.com/jlhpub.htm    BioBlurb: https://synapse9.com/jlh-blurb.htm 

Published

2026-10-03