The « good-enough » civilisation

Editorial Avenue No. 29: 15th February 2026

(Part1)

“If we are to become able to be the analysts of psychotic patients,

we must have reached down to the very primitive things in ourselves.”

Donald Winnicott (1947)

What is civilisation?

From the modern world’s imagination, a civilised society is constituted of visible developmental markers that ensure the maximum possible well-being for the majority of the people at all times. For this to be possible, a society requires a central authority (usually the State), adequate law enforcement, a capacity for maintaining predictability and order as well as external structures that maintain individualised identity formation and cultural bonding. The assumption is that access to higher forms of thought secures collective well-being. But civilisation is not sophistication. Sophistication is a refinement of the means given to us at a certain period of our history, but it does not eradicate brutality, animalism and overall savagery by our own fellow civilised humans. Societies across history may have been said to be sophisticated relative to their time, since humans keep on contributing to developmental advancements and they all have the capacity for expressing human virtues when in public: tolerance for the other, respect for codes of honour, having integrity and fairness. It is part of what it means to belong to a humanity, but humanity has also always engaged in the same dyad patterns: (i) Humans will organise themselves around social systems that preserve structure, survival and well-being for their whole unit but at the same time (ii) Humans will continually collapse under domination, duress and instability. One’s neighbour can just as easily become a disposable body that is stripped of its consciousness, identity and personhood the moment one finds it permissible to break a rule.  

Civilisation, as we understand it today, is more of a stress criterion.  It is dependent on existential threat, fear and humiliation for it to lose all of its operating principles and for humans to turn on each other. But our premise here is not that danger alone produces inhumane behaviour or that power and domination establish moral legitimacy over the other. On the contrary, we seek to demonstrate that a severe enough threat that destabilises our sense of existence is actually revealing the hidden grammar of the civilisation one is part of.

This brings forth the following questions:

• Does my civilisation consider a human being to be an inviolable person?

• Or are humans disposable bodies when pressure hits?

• Is the human being then simply a body with a utilitarian function?

• Or is it a category that eventually determines whether the life it carries has any value?

But even by asking these questions, we remain in the realm of primitive ethics. Framed in this way, this line of questioning still presents human beings as a protected class. It is aligned with human dignity which is why society today assumes it has civilisation when it is instead an advanced social organisation that does have morality integrated within it and which adjusts itself to what becomes ‘necessary’ when a dominant power generates just enough stress for it to start asking its leaders:

-       What is necessary in this situation to prevent immediate harm to our in-group?  

But the nature of civilisation itself is not about protection of one’s people under duress. It is ontological at source. A real civilisation cannot endure an ethical regression when it is under attack because to be civilised already implies being anchored in the understanding that personhood itself is by nature non-revocable, non-ownable, non-violable. In our framework, ‘personhood’ represents the conditions through which human-beings are allowed to exist as persons. By virtue of being in essence what constitutes real civilisation, a person then becomes morally addressable by all other persons.

But we no more have access to real civilisation on Earth because when a perpetrator commits an act of atrocity on another, the dominant act asserts what a person is allowed to be within this shared reality. This goes beyond mere dehumanisation of the other. The perpetrator treats the victim’s ontological rank in the universe as something that they can legislate upon. The perpetrator’s claim then becomes: “Your personhood was not granted to you by a higher Order and I personally believe I hold the authority to revoke this”. In a real civilisation, the Laws of the Universe would remain applicable no matter what which subsequently make ethical boundaries implicit and not technical obstacles for whoever dominates through power.

Humanity assumes that atrocities have hurt the body and the mind but fails to access the metaphysical crutch of the nature of reality, existence and of the world itself. Namely that the nature of living beings or their ontological status cannot be reorganised through human power. Human power is a mere enforcer within a specific permissible system of reality on Earth. It forces the world to comply with its reclassification of what it assesses reality to be but by so doing, it commits an illicit downgrading:

• Personhood becomes Object/Function/Resource

  Reality is coerced into behaving as if the downgrade is true

  The sovereignty of Being is usurped

Hence why, we keep on looping within a “good-enough” civilisation.

(To be continued)

Image created through the assistance of AI technology.

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End note

Our monthly editorials are pure channellings received from Heaven. The administrative team responsible for their transmission has the duty to publish each editorial on the 15th of every month. This date is symbolic, as it coincides with the official founding date of the web platform of the accredited Centre known as “God's Save Me,” on September 15, 2023. More than a simple editorial, “The Editorial Avenue” is a sacred pathway opened to humanity so that it may reconnect with the Light, for God cares for everyone.

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