The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - What Sloths Teach Us About the Superorganism

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on the multiple metaphors brought to mind via a single photograph, which depicts a sloth climbing a barbed wire fence in Costa Rica. Beyond evoking compassion for a species that's on the receiving end of human intervention into its ecosystem, the image raises larger ideas about the response of animals, including humans, to artificial cues and novel environments. Just as the sloth mistakes a fence post for the safety of a tree, modern humans mistake consumption, speed, and certainty for meaning. Moving beyond just the image, Nate unpacks the word "sloth" itself as one of the original seven deadly sins, offering a reimagining of what today's seven moral failings might be in the context of a global economic superorganism. Apathy, righteousness, and anthropocentrism might be today's major vices, which each have consequences for the environment and our relationship to it. Can we stand our ground locally against the global superorganism? How can we begin to reclaim agency and compassion – both for ourselves and the ecosystems we are inextricably a part of? Do our instincts no longer serve us in a world so rapidly and radically changed? (Recorded October 13th, 2025)   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie. ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Good morning. It is 25 years after I've left Wall Street, 25 years after I had a be in my bonnet to understand, care about, and engage with the human predicament. And that comes with a blessing and a curse. The blessing is I often integrate insights from between various disciplines and the curse is that I can't help unsee things. So normal everyday things like an advertisement or a billboard or a television show or a piece of art give me unbidden systems inferences. And today I'd like to talk about one of these images, a piece of art that has been prominent in my prefrontal cortex the last couple weeks. It is this image from photographer Emmanuel Tarty about a sloth in Costa Rica climbing a fence post by barbed wire. The picture was a finalist in the National Geographic Wildlife Photo of the Year. It's titled, There's No Place Like Home.

I probably have spent two full hours looking at this image in the last couple weeks, elapsed time, over time. And I'd like to share some of the wide boundary insights that have come to my mind and heart. while looking at this image. Firstly, it is a piece of art. Like, I can't stop looking at it. And I think the definition of good art is something that you get mesmerized by.

You get lost in. You look at. And the colors and the composition and this sloth in motion, slow motion, climbing up this fence post and the encroaching soybean plantation or whatever that is next to a forest. It's just, it tells a story. So it captures your attention as art.

That's point number one. Point number two in our class Reality 101, I taught my students about the concept of supernormal stimuli. which is some stimulation or some signal in our modern world that gives us an intense replication, but on steroids, on leverage, than our ancestral cues. The example I used to use was a popsicle stick painted red that was larger than the baby birds put into a baby bird's nest. A mama bird would preferentially feed a popsicle stick, a dead piece of human-created wood, worms and bugs, because it was bigger and redder than her own babies.

And so in this picture, this fence post, which was built to connect barbed wire to keep animals or humans out of this pasture, was a supernormal stimuli to this sloth. It was seeking refuge. And so it climbed something in its evolutionary past, climbing something didn't have a top to it and wasn't connected with sharp cutting wires. This is a supernormal stimuli placed in the environment of where a sloth has lived for millions of generations. And it's a novel thing. Like after a rain here, I go for a bike ride and use. see thousands of night crawlers and worms on the asphalt. Asphalt didn't end up being there.

And some of them end up being meals for birds, but a lot of them just end up drying out when the sun comes. There are many examples of supernormal stimuli in our current world. The third insight I had was, oh my gosh, why aren't the people in Costa Rica protecting these unbelievably cool sloth creatures. And by the way, other than Cucobar as a three-toed sloth would be on my bucket list to see, what a freaking cool creature they are. But it made me think, yeah, when I see Maasai warriors coming of age, they have to go out and kill a lion.

And how horrible is that? The king of the beast is just being killed. and a sloth, this beautiful creature in Costa Rica. And yet, when the raccoons break into my barn and kill my ducks, it's like war. So it's a different, it's a flip in perspective. It's not really war anymore because I just capture them and have our trap and drive them 10 miles and let them go down by the Mississippi River. What you get my point is I perceive lions and sloths as scarce and incredibly precious. But maybe people living where this land is in Costa Rica don't have that feeling.

And so we all view the world with respect to what's scarce and beautiful in our own area versus other areas. interesting perspective. Another idea I had in viewing this picture is the word sloth. It's an animal's name, but it's also one of the seven deadly sins. In Christian moral tradition, the seven deadly sins were pride, avarice, which I had to look up. It means greed, lust, envy, gluttony wrath and sloth, made famous by the movie seven with Brad Pitt and I forgot the other guy. Okay. Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman. Okay. So these seven moral traditions were back in the day, a map for averting personal vices in the time when humans lived in small communities. they were useful and perhaps even central then, and they're probably still relevant now,

but only partially. And sloth was the last listed and might not even be a sin in today's time, equal money, world. Um, slowing down writ large in our world is probably a virtue. But more broadly, um, and I'm looking at this picture and thinking about sloth, our current world has almost a hundred times the population when the seven deadly sins were invented, runs on fossil bank account of sunlight, global chastentine supply chains, and we have a social media algorithm-driven attention economy. So the failure modes in today's world have scaled from 2000 years

ago. And facing a global superorganism and what will come in his wake, perhaps there's a modern equivalent of these seven deadly sins. And I thought about what they might be. Certainty, overconfidence about how things will turn out. Righteousness, which is condescending, single issue evangelism in our conversations. Blame, which is outsourcing the cause and the response to the human predicament to various outgroups. Borrow or borrowing, which is consuming today by stealing from tomorrow. We're doing this at a national level with debt, but I fear that a lot of people will do that as well.

Apathy would be one of the modern seven deadly sins, writing off any decent or even good futures. Anthropocentrism centering only humans, not only now, but as things get tougher in the future. And then the seventh one that I thought of would be finning or unbecoming or dissolving or some were to represent the continued outsourcing of our creativity, cognition, and humanity to large language models, AI, and algorithms. Maybe I'll do it frankly on the seven modern deadly sins. But this is like, I don't know how strange I am to look at this picture and have all these

inferences. Another insight I had from looking at this picture of a sloth is it harkened back to the book that DJ White and I wrote, The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century. We cataloged the environmental damage and impact and risk into two categories. One is the metabolism, which is you just look at the size and the scale of the human endeavor and the size of GDP and you can infer the carbon ocean metabolic impacts on the world without looking at any issues related. just look at GDP and that's roughly a measure of our energy and our waste.

And then the other category is what we do with all that energy. And so looking at this sloth, there are what do people do locally in Costa Rica, wherever this picture was taken to protect the forests, protect the ecosystems, have people care about the local fauna and flora. And then there's the irrespective of what they do, There's a certain amount of global coal, oil, gas, land use, change, emissions, all the things that's growing in the atmosphere. And Costa Rican weather is going to change irrespective of what they do there because of demand for more meat in China and other things that result in a global burning of carbon. So this is, it bifurcated the two types of environmental impact.

But the biggest insight I had from seeing this image was it made me think of environmentalism writ large. And there are so many people that have this formula of showing this cute picture of a sloth or a baby elephant whose mom got slaughtered. or albatross that had plastic in its belly and died. And we show these images in our social media or LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or whatever as if to say, look, people, look at the horrible things

that are happening to the other creatures on Earth we share this planet with. We need to fix this. As if showing the suffering of another animal is enough to do that. And I think what ends up happening is this somewhat is spiteful because people are miserable and they're sharing their misery with others. Part of it is guilt because we see what's happening that we've lost 70% of animal populations

in the world since I've been alive. We're losing insect biomass a couple percent a year. There is guilt. There is shame. when we think about this. But when I think about it, if we pressed a button and every single of the 8.1 billion humans felt like I do, felt like many of you do,

that we need to widen the boundary of compassion and care beyond just the anthropocentric sphere to our kin, to our nieces, nephews, cousins in nature, If everyone felt that way and that changed their value system and they were willing to do something to protect ecosystems and their denizens, we would still have to navigate the coming economic great simplification. The only way out is through. So even if we all deeply, deeply care about other species, we're going to have to have to navigate. a substantial economic haircut in order to protect and breathe life into healthy ecosystems, etc.

So what do we do with that? Where to go once we understand that? I think there's three general steps. The first is, yes, let's press that button so that all humans widen their capacity to care for other species. Insects, birds, animals, oceans, watersheds, all the things that support life on Earth to care, to understand how they work and to care, a change in consciousness. That's number one. Number two is all of the bend-not-break interventions that we discuss on this podcast, Goldilocks technology.

you know, pro-social prepping, rocks in the river, advanced policy, we have to bend and not break in the coming decade or so, because the best path for sloths and elephants and dolphins is that the human system does not break, but that it bends. And lastly, one of the categories that I feel is going to increasingly be not. necessary is in service of life underground, like building Genesis plots wherever you are around the earth. We're not going to be able to change the metabolism. The metabolism of our global economic system is going to change from its own momentum or lack of inputs. And then we're going to have to respond. A Genesis plot, I just made that up, might be in your little area of the world in

Topeka, Kansas, or the outskirts of Sao Paulo, or somewhere in China, you and your friends and colleagues take a stand and breathe life into that plot so that there's more better soil and more biodiversity and more insects and more capacity for life in the same way that Gandalf in the end of the first movie said, you, shall not pass. The same sort of thing in your own ecosystem. You and people like you say that with respect to the global superorganism. That's what it's going to take. Someone on this land where this sloth lives, having that attitude that the superorganism will not cross this fence into the sloth or the orangutan or the leopard or the cucoburas.

home. And we can do these things. And yes, the bell rug had its little tentacle flip around Gandalf's leg, and he disappeared for quite a while in the movie. But he came back as Gandalf the White. And as you all know, in the end, the Shire was saved. So this is a true, frankly, I sat down. I didn't know what I was going to say, but I've been looking at this picture of this sloth and wanted to share my thoughts, which are quite wide boundary. And thank you for listening. I will talk to you next week.