Medea: Against Self-Organization

"Flow backward to your sources, sacred rivers,
And let the world's great order be reversed."
-- Medea, Ovid, Metamorphoses.

"The Medea Hypothesis", named after the murderous sorceress of Greek Mythology who killed her own children, is Peter Ward's polemic against the popular "Gaia Hypothesis", the loving Earth goddess, that claims our planet as a whole is like a single super-organism, an emergent, self-organizing, homeostatic system. Ward argues the biosphere is driven to self-destructive extremes -- life continually consumes all available resources to the point of extinction.

Is this the cold, hard truth of the universe?
Perhaps. Let's face it... and take responsibility.

Again Bataille's general economy.

Steven Shaviro, author of The Pinocchio Theory, provides an interesting analysis, calling for an end to our meta-narrative belief in the virtues of self-organization here