Grelinette wrote:How to explain this original and primitive human reflex to always look for global opulence, endless growth, and excess?
There is no genetic trend towards opulence, endless growth, excess ....
This is not reflex, but a causal chain of thermodynamic origin.
The human being has an associative cortex allowing him to record information through his memory.
These are then shared within the group because the human is a social animal.
Then, "cognitive pooling" allows an acceleration of the capacities of information processing: what is not discovered by one, does not take long to be discovered by the other.
When a discovery is made it quickly ends up being shared and improved ...
Once this knowledge is acquired, it ends up becoming cultural and its transmitted and improved from generation to generation.
The intergenerational cognitive feedback back ends up creating a collective brain fixed in time (past and present knowledge), it follows an increase of the knowledge which becomes very quickly exponential!
This increase in knowledge quickly translates into an energy dissipation which is also exponential!
Beyond a certain threshold (called critical threshold), human societies begin to agglomerate (tribe, village, city, nation, globalization) which considerably increases their impacts on their environments, and it has happened to this point. let things spoil, because the more we modify our environment, the more we have to adapt to it ... by dissipating even more energy ... to the "limit": this is our current situation!
"Engineering is sometimes about knowing when to stop" Charles De Gaulle.