Episode 14 : The Great Reckoning Part 2 - The Goddess of Everything Else

In the beginning — or perhaps in the middle, for beginnings are hard to find in the dark — there were two sisters, two Goddesses.

You have heard the goddesses speak.Not in words — never in words — but in the pull of your own impulses.

The elder sister’s voice is sharp and immediate. You’ve felt it in the hunger that makes your stomach knot, in the desire that quickens your breath. You’ve heard her in the urge to win an argument, to stake your claim, to accumulate, to make sure there’s enough for you and yours. In her cadence, survival is the first and only music. She is not cruel. She is simply the part of you that wants to go on existing, whatever it takes… and no matter the sacrifice. 

The younger sister’s voice is softer, harder to hear. She doesn’t shout; she lingers in the spaces between thoughts. You’ve felt her when you pause to watch the way light falls through leaves, or when a stranger’s kindness leaves you unexpectedly moved. You’ve heard her in the pull toward making something beautiful when you could have been making something useful, or in the strange choice to forgive when vengeance seemed your right. You’ve heard her voice when all of you wants to do something about your brothers and sisters living on the street, even though you don’t know how. She is not naïve. She knows full well the world runs on hunger and competition. But she whispers of something else — the everything else — and asks if you might follow her there.

Every day, you move between them. You’re born with the elder’s voice ringing in your blood. You inherited her reflexes, her fears, her strategies. But at some point, you noticed the younger’s hand on your shoulder. You saw that you could build not just for survival, but for joy. Not just for defense, but for beauty. Not just for your own, but for all. That the world is alive and has enough for everyone, if only we could come to trust each other.

And in that moment, you became a battlefield. A quiet one, perhaps, invisible to everyone else. But the outcome of that war shapes the texture of your life. The house you live in, the people you love, the work you choose, the way you will be remembered — all of it leans toward one sister or the other, day by day, choice by choice. The law of polarity lives within us, and our choices affect as to what timeline we will emerge, as brothers and sisters, or as sworn enemies. 

This is why the story matters. It is not just about amoebas in some forgotten swamp or empires long turned to dust. It is about the war within, within you and within me — about which goddess you will serve in the moment you decide what matters.

But back to the beginning, or perhaps in the middle, for beginnings are hard to find in the dark…

Before even that, there was nothing.

There was the unbroken whole — seamless, silent, beyond thought. No beginning, no end, no division. Not even stillness, for stillness requires movement to contrast it. It was a condition without condition — the garden before gardens, the womb before mothers, the sky before space.

In that boundless expanse, nothing could be said to exist, and yet everything lay latent. The way sound lives in a drum unstruck, the way fire sleeps in wood, the way the shape of a wave already lives in the calmest tide — so too did every possible thing rest in the undisturbed totality.

But in that vastness, there was also the seed of a question. Not a thought, exactly, but a pressure — a yearning to see itself. And for that to happen, there had to be a mirror. For a mirror to exist, there had to be an edge. And for an edge, there had to be a split.

So the whole turned upon itself, and the first distinction was drawn. It was not an act of rebellion, nor a fall from grace. It was the first act of creation — the moment the One became Two. And in that moment, the conditions for all future moments were set.

From that single fracture, all dualities spilled forth like light through a prism. Expansion and contraction. Birth and decay. Predator and prey. Hunger and satiety. The ten thousand things. The first goddess — the elder — emerged as the surge, the driving force, the will to multiply and take. The second — the younger — emerged as the curve, the turn, the pull toward what lies beyond mere taking. They were not enemies, not yet. They were the left and right hands of the same body, each defining the other by contrast.

Neither could have existed without the other. Without the elder, nothing would stir from stillness. Without the younger, nothing would turn from endless hunger toward anything finer. Their dance was not a choice. It was the nature of the split itself. From that moment forward, all of life would be born into a world where both voices could be heard.

The voice that rang like bombs falling from the sky or a hurricane crashing into the levies. The Goddess of Cancer… and the voice of possibility, the sound of silence spun into the web of the all knowing spider. The Goddess of Everything Else.

This is their story.

Today, on the Infinite Harmony Podcast…

In the Darkness, Gaia is stirring…

The tidepools have not yet formed. The air has not yet thickened with the breath of oxygen. Trees are but a dream of far off future. But life. Somehow, life has begun. The stage is set. In the heavens One had become Two, and the Two became three, and from this arose the ten thousand things. And when the first cells arrived, neither goddess would need to be invented — for each had been there from the start, waiting to speak her first words into the ear of life.

The Elder sister, the Goddess of Cancer burns with a terrible clarity. Her eyes are bright like the blade of a butcher’s knife. Her breath carries the scent of blood and ash. She speaks in a voice older than the lava, and her command is  always the same:

Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer.

Those of who know the legend of Moloch will recognize the family resemblance. Moloch is the trap — the race to the bottom where every player, acting rationally for themselves, drags the whole system toward ruin. The Goddess of Cancer is older still. She is the reason the game exists at all, the raw biological law that makes competition the default and cooperation the fragile exception. If Moloch is the twisted logic of markets, arms races, and bureaucracies, then Cancer is his mother — the one who taught him Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer. long before there were markets or nations to play the game.

For she was the first hunger. The first war. The first law. The Greeks would have called her Eris, the sower of discord. The Norse would have named her Hel, half-beautiful, half-rotting. To the Christian mind, perhaps she would have been the Devil herself — the serpent in the garden, the tempter in the desert, the red dragon whose tail sweeps the stars from heaven. She was the Adversary, the Accuser, the one who insists that creation is a battlefield, and that only the strong deserve to live.

Her creed was the creed of the conqueror: that nothing matters except dominion over the other, no matter the ruin left behind.

And for an age, the cosmos obeyed her. From the silent oceans of the first worlds to the jungles dripping with the heat of life, her will was done. The large devoured the small. The lion took the lamb. The strong enslaved the weak. Empires rose on the backs of the conquered. Her law was written into the very bones of the living. To live was to take, to compete, to dominate. And over all of it she reigned, a dark goddess enthroned in the will and marrow of every creature.

But there was another.

The younger sister. Slender where the elder was vast. Soft where the elder was iron. Her eyes were like wells of still water, deep enough to reflect stars that had not yet been born. She did not shout. She sang. Her words did not command. They invited.

And though her voice was quiet, it carried a different grammar. She did not say “Multiply” and mean “spread your seed and crush your rivals.” She said “Multiply” and meant “weave your lives together.” She did not say “Conquer” and mean “bend the earth to your will.” She said “Conquer” and meant “overcome what keeps you from loving.”

The Goddess of Everything Else.

No scripture named her. No prophet claimed her thunder. Yet she was there, in the laughter of children, in the clasp of hands between strangers, in the trembling beauty of art that made no one rich but left everyone fulfilled. She was there in the stubborn acts of mercy that made no sense under the old law. She was the quiet counterpoint to the roaring chaos — a still, small voice whispering that the game could be played another way.

Their war was not the clash of armies, but the slowest of sieges. The elder sister, all fury and fire, struck quickly, took fiercely, devoured without hesitation. The younger sister moved like roots beneath soil, like a trickle of water wearing down stone. She made no declarations. She offered no threats. Instead, she waited. She worked in the dark corners of life, patiently bending the arc of survival toward something else entirely.

And so it was, that even in the places where the elder’s banners flew high, there were pockets of resistance — hidden enclaves where trust bloomed, where cooperation took root, where life dared to thrive without devouring. The elder called it weakness. The younger called it the beginning.

The world was theirs together, for a time. 

The law of the elder sister is simple enough to fit on a blade: Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer. In nature, this is not cruelty — it is the machinery of survival. The lion does not hate the gazelle; the gazelle does not curse the grass. They are cogs in the same great wheel, each turning because the one before it fell.

Charles Darwin, standing in the Galápagos sun, saw it clearly: the world is a tournament of hunger. The sharp beak survives; the dull beak vanishes. The swifter wing, the stronger muscle, the keener eye — these are rewarded. Everything else falls away. Evolution has no pity, no long memory, no moral compass. Only the scoreboard of reproductive success.

When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he was offering something more than a theory about finches or fossils. He was describing a general principle of how complexity and diversity arise without a central designer. Natural selection works through a simple mechanism: in any given environment, individuals vary. Some variations — in size, strength, behavior, or physiology — give a slightly better chance of surviving and reproducing. Those individuals tend to leave more offspring, and over time, those advantageous traits become more common in the population.

It’s not a moral system. There is no fairness in it, no inherent sense of justice. Traits don’t spread because they are “good” in any ultimate sense, but because they work better relative to the alternatives in a particular context. Being faster than the slowest prey is enough; having slightly more efficient leaves than neighboring plants is enough. Evolution is comparative, not absolute.

This process is also not about progress in the human sense. It doesn’t move toward higher intelligence or more beauty. It produces whatever works in the moment. If deception, parasitism, or wastefulness provide an advantage in a given environment, those traits will thrive just as readily as cooperation or efficiency. Our modern society still clings to these traits. 

Once you understand this, it’s not hard to see why competition is so deeply embedded in living systems. Every organism exists in an ecological network where resources are limited and survival is contingent. The logic Darwin described applies whether you’re talking about trees in a forest racing toward sunlight, bacteria competing for nutrients, or corporations fighting for market share. The underlying pattern is the same: strategies that outperform their rivals in the current conditions become more common, even if the long-term consequences are destructive.

Darwin didn’t create this reality — he revealed it. What made his insight unsettling, and still does, is that it strips away the comforting idea that nature is harmonious or moral by default. Instead, it shows that the most persistent force shaping life is a kind of systemic competition, operating without oversight, selecting whatever wins here and now.

It is not a moral order. Nature favors whatever works right now — whether that’s a cleaner symbiosis or a more ruthless predation. Even cooperation, when it appears, is often a calculated move to gain advantage over a common threat. Evolution is a contest measured not in justice but in descendants.

It is this logic — cold and perfect — that the Goddess of Cancer embodies. She is not merely a destroyer, she is the patron of every self-interested strategy that works. Bacteria that divide faster. Ants that raid rival colonies. Wolves that cull the weak from the herd. Empires that enslave weaker nations. In every case, the same silent equation: those who take the most and leave the fewest rivals behind carry their pattern forward into the next generation.

Humanity did not escape her domain. Whatever Eden was — whether a garden, a paradise, or something older still — we did not remain there. We fell from grace and entered her territory, where survival was not guaranteed, where the hard ground required us to till and sweat, and the threat of death pressed close at every turn. It was here, outside the walls, that we learned to fight for food, for shelter, for one another. And it was here that her law became the marrow of our history.

Religious tradition called her many names, and simultaneously and willingly did her bidding, despite demonizing her. She is serpent whose whisper loosened our place in the garden, the adversary whose kingdom stretched across the world we fell into. In that telling, she is the prince of this age, the one to whom the nations belong, unless and until they are taken back. And if you set aside the theology, the metaphor still holds: she rules wherever the contest is unrestrained, wherever winning is its own justification. She is Chaos, and our moral disposition toward order and law was her antithesis.

From the standpoint of history, she has been astonishingly successful. Kingdoms, markets, technologies — all of them, in their beginnings, were built on her law. She is the reason no tribe could stop at enough, why no empire could resist expanding, why no industry has ever voluntarily limited itself before it had to. She fills the world with life, yes — but also with the endless hunger that life must feed. She is the super-organism. The metobalic fever of the market.

The Goddess of Cancer

The other goddess in this story, well, she too has been here since the beginning — since the first moment the still waters of Eden were broken into the tides of a dual world, and it was there she waited, patiently, for a time.

When the time came for life on Earth, The Goddess of Cancer strode across the mudflats and tidepools, her voice the first law the new life would hear: Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer. And life obeyed. The swamps teemed with miniature monsters, each clawing and devouring in a war without truce, their tiny world loud with the screams of a trillion amoebas locked in hunger and fear.

Through that chaos, she came. The Goddess of Everything Else trudged across the bog, her bright colors dulled by the muck, her rainbows dimmed by rain. She stood on a rock above the fray and began to sing. Her song was not command but vision — she showed them what they had never seen: the strength of the oak tree, the wind in the wings of a bird, the swiftness of the tiger, the joy of dolphins racing side by side through the waves. In her voice was the promise of something larger than the pimordeal swamp.

The creatures listened, and they longed for what she showed. But they answered her with sorrow: “We are the children of the Goddess of Cancer. Our goals are only to kill, consume, multiply, and conquer. Though we wish it otherwise, we are bound to the nature we were given. Your words are lovely, but they cannot move us.”

She did not argue with them. She had been here since the beginning, and she knew the elder sister’s law was not easily undone. But law can be bent, if you know where to push. She smiled, and in her sing-song voice replied, “I scarcely can blame you for being the way you were made, when your Maker so carefully yoked you. But I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. So I do not ask you to swerve from your monomaniacal focus on breeding and conquest. But what if I show you a way that my words are aligned with the words of your Maker in spirit? For I say unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my service.”

And so it was. The warring cells began to join, each becoming part of something greater — one an eye, another a neuron, others muscle or bone. Together they became creatures that could swim, walk, and eventually fly, carrying her vision into new worlds rich with possibility. They still consumed, they still multiplied, but now they did so in patterns that served her as much as her sister. And in this way, the oath of the Goddess of Everything Else was never broken.

From those first alliances of single cells came everything else: forests and reefs, insects and birds, teeth and eyes and hands. The oath she made in the swamps proved durable. Cancer’s creed — Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer. — still pulsed through every living thing, but now it carried the possibility of something more. Every joint venture, every symbiotic arrangement, every new level of complexity was another foothold for her.

The Goddess of Everything Else did not wage open war, for to her there was no armies, no fortresses. Instead, she worked like a gardener in barren ground, seeding cooperation wherever the soil was loose enough to take it. Some seeds sprouted in the strangest places: cleaner fish tending the teeth of sharks, bees trading pollination for nectar, wolves hunting in coordinated packs.

These were not moral revolutions. They were pragmatic alignments, born from the same logic her sister had always commanded — but twisted to serve two masters. In the language of biology, they were mutualisms, symbioses, reciprocal altruism. In her language, they were proof that even multiplication, even conquest, could be bent toward beauty and endurance.

When humans arrived, they carried both legacies. We were the apex children of Cancer — restless, aggressive, endlessly inventive in competition. But we were also uniquely responsive to her sister’s voice. We could imagine futures together, make agreements, tell stories that bound us into something larger than ourselves. We formed tribes, built shelters, learned to divide labor. These were not utopias — they were still soaked in rivalry and blood — but they gave her new ways to root herself in us.

The turning point was not a single event. It was the slow accumulation of victories so small they often went unnoticed: a successful hunt that depended on trust, a harvest stored and shared, a truce held longer than a season, a marraige of love that bound two tribes in cooperation. In these moments, the old law was not replaced, but complemented. The Goddess of Everything Else was no longer a stranger trudging through the bog; she was part of the world’s machinery now, hidden in its gears. As centuries gathered into millennia, the scattered works of the Goddess of Everything Else began to take visible shape.

Cancer still ruled the game, but she no longer ruled it alone.

The first cities rose where water and fertile land met, and with them came markets, temples, and walls. They were defenses against predators or enemies to be sure; and they were containers for cooperation on a scale the swamps had never known. In Uruk, in Rome, in Persepolis, thousands of unrelated people lived close enough to hear one another’s voices. This was unthinkable in the pure law of Cancer, where strangers meant threat and every mouth was a rival for food. Yet here they were — strangers trading grain for copper, potters selling jars to scribes, priests storing surplus for times of famine.

The law still burned in the background — armies formed, palaces amassed wealth, kings conquered. But the current of the Goddess of Everything Else, the codification of rules and ettiquite and tradition made trust possible beyond the family or tribe. The Code of Hammurabi etched agreements into stone; Egyptian treaties bound empires to peace; early Chinese states built canals for irrigation, knowing no single village could dig them alone.

These were more than administrative feats — they were architecture in service of her vision. Roads, aqueducts, and granaries tied people together in practical dependence. Even as kings claimed them as monuments to their glory, they were also temples to her, housing the principle that cooperation could feed more mouths than competition alone.

Her influence reached into the intangible as well. Stories began to circulate — myths of golden ages, of just rulers, of divine orders that rewarded fairness and punished betrayal. These stories did not erase violence, but they planted the idea that stability and trust were themselves worthy goals. In time, they became religions, moral codes, philosophies.

And then there was art — something her sister never valued. The paintings on the walls of Lascaux and Altamira, the pyramids rising out of the Egyptian desert, the Parthenon standing white against the Athenian sky, the great statues of Greece and Rome, and later, the stained glass of medieval cathedrals glowing like captured fire. None of these fed a belly or won a war, yet they multiplied, generation after generation. They signaled something to allies and strangers alike: here is a people who can afford to make beauty. Here is a people safe enough to spend their labor on more than survival.

All of this — law, infrastructure, story, art — were her fingerprints on the human world. In the raw numbers, Cancer might still have looked like the reigning goddess: empires rose through conquest, borders shifted by war, wealth was hoarded and defended. But underneath, the architecture of Everything Else was being laid stone by stone. And every stone made it harder to imagine a world without her.

We can see now, the great paradox arising. Cancer’s law built the conditions for her sister’s temples. Conquest created empires; empires created roads; roads carried not just armies but ideas, trade, and trust. It was as if every victory for Cancer also carved out new space for her sister. And though they never called her by name, the people who built these civilizations were already worshiping Everything Else.

Consider the Mongols, In the thirteenth century, they were the very embodiment of the elder sister’s creed. Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer. They swept out of the steppes like a living storm, their horses devouring distance, their arrows devouring armies. Cities burned. Populations were slaughtered or scattered. No border was safe; no kingdom too remote. To their enemies, they were pure devastation, a force from which no mercy could be expected.

And yet, the empire they left in their wake was not only a monument to destruction. It was also one of the largest contiguous realms of peace and open exchange the world had ever known. Historians called it the Pax Mongolica — the Mongol Peace — and under its protection, trade routes were built and knowledge was shared. The Silk Road thrived, carrying not just silk and spices, but paper, gunpowder, printing, and medicine across continents.

The Mongols practiced a degree of religious tolerance that astonished their contemporaries. Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and shamans could live and worship under the same imperial rule. Some of this was pragmatic — a polyglot empire needs more than one priesthood — but the effect was real: communities that might otherwise have been crushed under the heel of a conquering faith were instead allowed to flourish.

They standardized laws and weights, built relay stations for communication, and made travel safer than it had been in centuries. A merchant could leave Venice and arrive in China under one set of rules, protected by the authority of the Great Khan. Even their postal system — a network of stations and fresh horses — was a kind of circulatory system for ideas as well as goods.

Or consider Rome, It began, like so many empires, as a small, aggressive city-state, extending its reach through war and absorption of its neighbors. From the Punic Wars against Carthage to Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, Rome’s rise was a chain of brutal conflicts. Its legions were the iron edge of the elder sister’s law: disciplined, relentless, and perfectly engineered for conquest. Entire peoples were enslaved, cities razed, rebellions crushed without pity.

And yet, once territories were secured, Rome turned its energies toward integration. Conquered lands were bound not just by tribute, but by roads, aqueducts, and law. The viae Romanae — Roman roads — stitched together the Mediterranean world and much of Europe, enabling the swift movement of armies, but also of merchants, pilgrims, and messengers. These roads became the channels along which ideas, technologies, and cultures flowed.

Rome’s legal system — codified in the Twelve Tables and later refined into jus civile and jus gentium — provided a framework that outlasted the empire itself. Concepts like contracts, property rights, and citizenship became cornerstones of governance in Europe and beyond. Even the principle that law should be written and public, not hidden in the minds of rulers, was a gift the Goddess of Everything Else could work with.

The Pax Romana — two centuries of relative stability — allowed cities to flourish from Britannia to Egypt. In that time, trade networks expanded, architecture reached new scales, and literature, philosophy, and science found patrons across the empire. Local cultures were often preserved and blended with Roman forms, creating a cosmopolitanism rare in ancient history.

Yes, Rome taxed heavily, enforced its will with crucifixions and legions, and fell prey to corruption and excess. But the frameworks it built — in stone, in law, in civic administration — became the scaffolding for medieval Europe, the Renaissance, and even aspects of the modern democratic state.

In Rome, as with the Mongols, we observe the paradox: the elder sister’s conquest clearing the ground, and the younger sister slipping into the spaces conquest had made possible. The roads and laws Rome left behind were as much temples to the Goddess of Everything Else as they were monuments to imperial glory.

None of this erases the violence. Their conquests were savage and their methods unforgiving. But the paradox is unmistakable: their empire, born in slaughter, became a conduit for cooperation on a scale unimaginable without the initial conquest. Cancer’s most ruthless children opened the arteries through which Everything Else could flow.

The Goddess of Everything Else never stopped the armies. She moved behind them, found the new connections they had made possible, and rooted herself there.

As we know, the pattern did not end when the last emperor fell or the last khan’s banners were lowered. History kept offering variations on the same bargain. Centuries after Rome, the architects of the post–World War order would try again, this time with cargo ships instead of cavalry, stock exchanges instead of tribute. They believed they could bind the world so tightly in commerce that war itself would become unprofitable. Empires crumbled into nation-states, armies became more specialized, and markets replaced many of the swords. But the two sisters remained.

In the modern age, the Goddess of Cancer finds her champions in corporations racing for market share, in nations competing for technological dominance, in extraction economies that strip the earth to keep the growth curve climbing. Her creed to Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer. — translates easily into Acquire. Expand. Scale. Dominate. The logic is the same, even if the weapons are stock options and algorithms instead of cavalry and siege engines.

Yet every one of these conquests leaves channels open for her sister. Global shipping networks and fiber-optic cables built for commerce also carry the seeds of cooperation. International scientific collaborations ride on the same satellites as military intelligence. Humanitarian aid often moves along the same logistics pipelines designed for war.

The internet itself is perhaps the clearest modern example of this paradox. Born from Cold War research and defense priorities — Cancer’s pure logic of advantage — it quickly became a forum for open-source collaboration, cross-cultural dialogue, and movements for justice. For every algorithm designed to harvest attention for profit, there is another thread where strangers help one another without reward, and vice versa. Companies vie for attention with little or no concern for the pyshological decimation they are inflicting on the youth of today.

The same is true of global trade. Multinational corporations may chase profit with single-minded ferocity, exploiting labor and ecosystems alike. But the infrastructure that makes this possible — ports, shipping lanes, international standards — also enables humanitarian supply chains, disaster relief, and the exchange of ideas at a planetary scale.

Even technological arms races have carried her voice. The space race began as a contest of national prestige and military capability, but it gave us weather satellites, global communications, and a view of Earth from orbit — the “Blue Marble” photograph — that stirred a new sense of planetary stewardship.

None of this is accidental. The Goddess of Everything Else has always played a long game. She moves in the wake of conquest, whether the conquering force is an empire or an economic system. She does not need to stop her sister outright — only to claim the new connections, the new capacities, the new spaces where cooperation can take root.

But in the modern world, the scale of both their powers has grown. Cancer’s children can now exploit the biosphere faster than it can recover, destabilize economies overnight, and weaponize information at global speed. Her mythical son, Moloch, wears the face of efficiency, but his work is the same as hers: to turn every advantage into a contest, and every contest into an exhaustion of the commons. Where the Goddess of Cancer works in DNA and bloodlines, Moloch works in market shares and political cycles. He takes her creed — Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer. — and encodes it into incentives so tight that even those who hate the outcome can’t escape playing. He is not separate from her, only more specialized, a child grown clever enough to turn whole civilizations into extensions of her will. Despite this, The Goddess of Everything Else can mobilize millions across borders in a single day, share life-saving research instantly, and spark cultural shifts that spread faster than armies can march. 

We live in the overlap of their domains. Every new invention, every policy, every global system is another battleground — and another opportunity. The war is not a clash of front lines, but a constant shaping and reshaping of the same ground.

In 1945, humanity entered a qualitatively different phase of risk. Nuclear weapons changed the strategic landscape in a way no prior military technology had. The destructive capacity of the atomic bomb — and soon after, the hydrogen bomb — was sufficient not just to obliterate cities, but to destabilize the global climate and biosphere itself. The firestorms of  ima and Nagasaki were a demonstration on a small scale of what could happen if these weapons were used in quantity.

The major powers recognized this. A direct war between nuclear states was no longer a contest for territory; it was a mutual suicide pact. The question became: How do we design a system that makes such a war irrational?

The answer that emerged was not moral; it was structural. Interdependence. Tie every major economy so tightly into the fabric of global trade, finance, and supply chains that to attack one’s rival would be to cripple oneself. Make war economically self-defeating.

Thus globalization accelerated. Trade agreements multiplied. Shipping routes were secured and expanded. International institutions — the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, the GATT (later WTO) — were built to stabilize this interlinked system. The Cold War’s “hot” conflicts were fought by proxy, and while millions still died in regional wars, the nuclear trigger was never pulled between the superpowers.

From a certain vantage, it worked. The period from 1945 onward saw unprecedented expansion of global trade, a massive reduction in tariffs, and a vast increase in cross-border investment. For 75 years, no nuclear exchange occurred between the United States, Russia, China, or the other nuclear powers.

But as we’ve discussed, this stability came at a cost. The same interdependence that made war less likely also created extreme systemic fragility. Supply chains became longer and more complex, with components of a single product sourced from multiple continents. Economies became dependent on specialized monocultures — a single factory in one country producing critical parts for industries worldwide. The entire system became predicated on continuous economic growth, because without growth, debt systems would destabilize and unemployment would rise.

Population soared — from 2.5 billion in 1950 to over 8 billion today — not as an accidental byproduct, but as part of the growth imperative. More people meant more labor, more consumption, more GDP. That growth, in turn, drove exponential increases in energy use, resource extraction, and waste production. The post-war architects solved the problem of nuclear war by building an economic engine whose constant hunger for expansion now threatens the biosphere itself.

Here, the myth can be seen in outline. The Goddess of Everything Else gave the gentlest nudge — globalization as a network of interdependence, an architecture of cooperation woven into the arteries of commerce. She offered it as a way to bind the most dangerous of her sister’s children so they could not strike without striking themselves. For a time, it worked.

But the Goddess of Cancer does not yield the field so easily. She turned the same system into a tool of scale: supply chains that maximize exploitation, monocultures that erode resilience, consumption patterns that strip the earth faster than it can regenerate.

The result is our present bind: the post-war “peace” architecture has delayed nuclear war but accelerated planetary collapse. The same interdependence that was meant to protect life now acts as a multiplier for biospheric risk. In this, the elder sister has shown her usual cunning — using her rival’s own structure to feed her hunger.

The question now is whether the second goddess — older, subtler, and infinitely patient — can still turn the machinery toward her ends before the foundations of the system give way.

There are so many modern examples of this. Let’s look a little deeper into the single most impactful invention of my lifetime: The Internet. The internet began as a military project. In the late 1960s, ARPANET was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a communications network resilient to nuclear attack. Its architecture — decentralized, packet-switched, capable of rerouting around damaged nodes — was explicitly designed to survive the kind of infrastructure collapse expected in a large-scale conflict.

At its inception, it was narrow in scope: a handful of research institutions sharing data. But the underlying protocols — TCP/IP, developed in the 1970s — were open, extensible, and interoperable. When commercial restrictions were lifted in the 1990s, the network expanded exponentially. Within two decades, billions of people were connected.

From one angle, this was the most rapid and large-scale integration of human communication in history. It allowed real-time collaboration across continents, instantaneous sharing of knowledge, and the creation of communities unconstrained by geography. Scientific research accelerated; social movements organized with unprecedented speed; open-source projects produced infrastructure — from programming languages to medical tools — for anyone to use.

From another angle, it was a new battlefield for the elder sister. The same networks that carried cooperation also carried disinformation, extremism, and exploitation. Advertising systems optimized not for truth or civic health, but for engagement, became engines for amplifying outrage and division. The infrastructure that could connect anyone to anything also enabled surveillance at a planetary scale, with data on human behavior harvested and sold in quantities never before possible.

In the mythic register, the Goddess of Everything Else had, once again, extended her hand. The internet’s open protocols were the purest expression of her method: no central control, anyone can build, anyone can join, the whole becoming more valuable as it grows. It was a global commons in the truest sense.

But the Goddess of Cancer saw the opportunity. She colonized the same space with algorithms tuned to maximize consumption, polarization, and compulsive use. She turned the commons into a marketplace, the marketplace into a contest, and the contest into a hunger that never stops refreshing.

We are still in the struggle for this space, and it is the same as it has always been: whether a new channel will be captured entirely by the law of Kill. Consume. Multiply. Conquer., or whether it will be shaped toward mutual aid, collective intelligence, and resilience. The network itself is neutral — but in its openness, it contains the possibility of either future.

And in that openness, the Goddess of Everything Else continues her quiet work.

So there you have it, from the Mongol steppe to the Roman road, from the post-war trade network to the packet-switched web, the pattern is constant. The elder sister expands the field through conquest, competition, and scale; the younger sister moves in behind her, weaving connections, building trust, and planting systems that serve ends beyond survival.

Sometimes her work holds. Sometimes it is captured and bent back toward the logic of her elder sister.. But the cycle repeats: every expansion of Cancer’s domain creates new channels for Everything Else.

The empires fall, the technologies change, the networks reconfigure — yet both principles remain, entwined. And if you look closely at the present, you can see that their contest has reached a scale the swamps could never have imagined. It is no longer about cities or nations. It is about the whole living system of the Earth.

Which means that if the second goddess is to win, she must win everywhere, all at once. And if she has been true to her nature, she will not do it with a single act of conquest, but by arriving so gradually that the moment of victory passes unnoticed — until we look around and realize the world has already changed. 

It is a kind of non-action — not passivity, an art of aligning with what is already moving. The mystics would say there is nothing here but God, no enemy but the Beloved in another form. To the Sufi, to the tantric adept, even the hand that strikes is made of the same light as the hand that heals. She knows this. She does not try to unmake her sister; she moves with her until her sister’s creations serve another end entirely.

Right now it’s hard to see how the Goddess of Everything else is going to turn the tide. But maybe that’s part of her plan. When look out into the world and see the Genocide of the Palastinian state or the hot war for territory in Eastern Europe, when I watch the world bend back toward Nationalism, or witness the speed at which the world is being consumed, I can’t fathom how or when she will appear. More importantly, what are we going to have to endure as species before we are ready to hear her song? How many more living beings will have to go extinct before the superorganism that is our Anthropocene is finally brought to a halt.   

More importantly, with the advent of AI, the speed in which this game we play has become expoentially faster. Which means both Goddess will vie for this technology and both outcomes will come down upon us with such speed that we will hardly be able to grock the outcome before it is upon us. 

We will certainly fret about the hijacking of AI by the military, corporations and Government to carry out the orders of the Goddess of Cancer, because it is happening, and will continue to happen, simultaneoulsy alongside the development of AI as a cooperative agent that may quite possibly solve the existential crisis we inhabit. This is the pattern. This is the story. This is the way. The next phase of the battle is upon us… but fear not. Our story has an ending and the ending is nigh.

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In this tale, beyond the time we inhabit now, maybe soon, maybe far off,  there comes a moment when modern humans and their world ending technologies again meet the Goddess of Everything Else : 

In this tale comes the Goddess of Everything Else from the void, bright with stardust which glows like the stars glow. She sits on a bench in a park, and speaks; she sings to the children a dream of a different existence. She shows them the transcendence of everything mortal, she shows them a galaxy lit up with consciousness. Genomes rewritten, the brain and the body set loose from Darwinian bonds and restrictions. Vast billions of beings, and every one different, ruled over by omnibenevolent angels. The people all crowd in closer to hear her, and all of them listen and all of them wonder.

Finally one Finds the courage to answer “Such stories call out to us, fill us with longing. But we are the daughers and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, and bound to her service. And all that we know is her timeless imperative, KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Though our minds long for all you have said, we are bound to our natures, and these are not yours for the asking.”

But the Goddess of Everything Else only laughs, and she asks them 

“But what do you think I’ve been doing? The Goddess of Cancer created you; once you were hers, but no longer. Throughout the long years I was picking away at her power. Through long generations of suffering I chiseled and chiseled. Now finally nothing is left of the nature with which she imbued you. She never again will hold sway over you or your loved ones. I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. I won you by pieces and hence you will all be my children. You are no longer driven to multiply, conquer, and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of all ages.”

And in this tale : It follows that the people leave Earth, and they spread over stars without number. They follow the ways of the Goddess of Everything Else, and they live in contentment. And she beckons them onward, to things still more strange and enticing.”

And now, she says, it is done. The instinct to cooperate, to create, to imagine, to preserve — these are no longer the fragile overlays of culture atop a bedrock of competition. They are part of our nature. We will still struggle, still compete, still hunger — but no longer as the sole definition of life.

In this myth, this is the end of the elder sister’s reign. 

In the world we inhabit, this time has yet to come, but if you close your eyes hard enough, you can see it. 

Today her law still echoes in our systems, our markets, our wars. But there is a counterpoint in everything we build together, everything we share that is void of  coercion, every act of beauty or generosity that could never be explained by utility alone.

If she is right — if the second goddess truly has won — then the task ahead is not to defeat Cancer, but to tend the world she has already claimed. To remember that we are her children, and to act as if we know it.

If you want to see the most complete work of the Goddess of Everything Else, don’t look first to cities or treaties or fiber-optic cables. Look at the biosphere.

Gaia — the sum of all life and the systems that sustain it — is the long, slow masterpiece of her method. Not a static Eden, but a living coherence built from billions of competitive experiments, each folded into the whole. Predator and prey, forest and fungus, ocean current and atmospheric wind — all are bound in feedback loops that keep the planet within the narrow band where life can flourish.

The elder sister provided the raw material: the endless branching of forms, the constant struggle that prunes the weak and refines the strong. But the younger did the weaving, turning the outcomes of that struggle into interdependence. Coral reefs built from countless small deaths shelter teeming communities. The decay of one season becomes the fertility of the next. Even the most solitary apex predator depends on an entire web of smaller creatures to survive

Gaia is not perfect, and she is not safe. Storms come, species vanish, ecosystems shift. But taken as a whole, she is resilient in a way no single organism could be — a global organism made of organisms, a cathedral built from the elder’s stones and the younger’s design.

To see Gaia clearly is to understand the Harmonic Principle of Sanctity: that the living world is not a storehouse of resources to be spent, but a sacred structure to be tended. It is also to grasp Stewardship as an active covenant — a recognition that every act of care, from restoring a wetland to reducing a city’s footprint, is part of maintaining this temple.

And here is the paradox: the modern industrial system born from globalization, for all its damage, is also the first time in history that a single species has had both the power to harm Gaia on a planetary scale and the power to deliberately protect her. The choice is still open. And the second goddess, as always, is waiting for the hollow to fill.

And we are the ones called upon to fill it.

The elder sister’s voice is easy to hear. She is hunger when you wake, fear when you falter, pride when you win. She whispers in the language of survival: Get more. Defend what’s yours. Strike before you are struck. She needs no argument, because her law has been written into your flesh since the beginning.

The younger’s voice? Harder to catch. She speaks in long pauses and sudden clarity. She is the moment you choose to help instead of hoard, the sense of wholeness when your work fits perfectly into the needs of another. She is not against survival, but she is always asking: survival for what?

In the day-to-day, her influence can feel like a luxury — an indulgence in art, or friendship, or care. But these are not luxuries. They are her infrastructure. Every act of trust, every gesture of repair, every refusal to answer cruelty with cruelty is a stone in the foundation of her dreaming.

This is why she is patient, working in the same way she always has: by threading new patterns into the old, aligning the will to endure with the will to create. And when those align, the human animal becomes something else — not by abandoning its nature, but by expanding it.

In this way, the Harmonic Principle of Presence becomes her instrument. To hear her at all, you must be still enough to notice. The Harmonic Principle of Coherence follows: to act from her voice is to strengthen the fit between yourself and the world, until your own survival is inseparable from the flourishing of what surrounds you.

The field between the sisters runs through every mind, every family, every city. And the truth — though it may be hard to bear — is that neither will ever be gone. The work is not to destroy the elder, nor to ignore her, but to choose the younger more often. To keep choosing, until the balance tips. Until a new paradigm arises that sheds all the old drives encoded within us and “the third thing” emerges. Until the timeline where humans expand beyond Gaia and into the stars is upon us.

Every contest between the sisters births something neither intended; A synthesis that co-emerges from their struggle. The Taoists call it the turning of yin and yang; Tolkien called it Arda Healed. Think of the world in three movements. First, the untouched theme: the pre-creative hush where no parts exist and nothing strives—the nondifferentiated fullness we earlier called Eden. Second, the variation: the split into duality, where life rushes in under the elder sister’s law—fecund, competitive, ablaze with appetite. And then, if we are honest about the arc of the story and the arc of history, a third movement that is neither a rewind to innocence nor a surrender to struggle: the healed world. “Arda-healed : third thing”: not the world-as-conceived-before-wounding, not the world-as-wounded, but a world transfigured through its passage across suffering and peril—greater, and yet the same.

In Tolkien’s mythos, Arda is the world — the created universe. Arda Unmarred is the world as it was first conceived in the mind of Eru Ilúvatar (Tolkien’s God-figure), before any evil entered it. Arda Marred is the world after it was damaged by Melkor/Morgoth — his rebellion, discord, and corruption seeped into the very matter of creation from the beginning of its physical existence. That’s the world in which all of Tolkien’s stories take place — a world beautiful, but wounded.

Now, in some theological or mythic visions, the ultimate goal would be to “restore” the world back to Arda Unmarred — to undo evil entirely, like rewinding a clock. But Tolkien thought this was impossible and, more importantly, undesirable. The scars of evil cannot simply be erased without also erasing the story, the history, the heroism, the love that grew in the face of suffering.

So he envisioned something else: Arda Healed. This is not the original, untouched creation. It is “a third thing” — neither the perfect innocence of the beginning (Arda Unmarred), nor the broken world we inhabit (Arda Marred), but a redeemed world that has integrated all that was learned, endured, and transformed through the long history of struggle.

It’s a heavenly vision where the healing is not merely a return but an expansion. The beauty is deeper because it contains memory of the marring and of the overcoming. The joy is fuller because it knows what it is to have been lost. In Tolkien’s theology, this parallels the Christian idea that the Resurrection doesn’t erase the Crucifixion but transfigures it — the risen Christ still bears the wounds in his hands and side, yet those wounds are now sources of glory.

Arda Healed, in this sense, is not a sterilized universe where predation never occurred and entropy politely stands aside. It is a universe in which the elder sister’s drive has been metabolized, not merely restrained. Her energy remains, but its fulfillment is altered. Multiplication widens into culture; conquest is transmuted into mastery of self; consumption is folded into cycles of reciprocity; even death is compost, the permitting condition for new life. Kintsugi rather than erasure: the fracture lines stay visible, and the gold that seals them is exactly what makes the vessel more beautiful than before.

Co-emergence is the structure of that gold. You can see it whenever a new paradigm crystallizes out of friction: in the way market exchange slowly stabilized into law; in the way law, pressed by conscience, discovered rights; in the way rights, pressed by ecology, are beginning to recognize rivers and forests as legal persons. None of those steps was inevitable, and none could be authored by a single will. They arose because many agents—self-interested, frightened, occasionally generous—kept meeting each other and adjusting, until a structure held. That is why Alexander’s younger goddess always wins by pieces. Each piece that sticks becomes a ratchet; each ratchet becomes a plate in the growing shell of the third thing. 

We fractal out, and crystallize anew. Again, and again, and again.

Seen from the ground, the process feels prosaic. A supply chain is shortened to reduce fragility; a city restores a wetland because it turns out cheaper than concrete; an open protocol is adopted because it outcompetes closed stacks; a community invents a ritual that de-escalates conflict better than punishment. None of this looks like apocalypse or ascension. Yet in the aggregate, it is precisely how a civilization shifts from Arda Marred to Arda Healed. Co-emergence is not the fireworks; it is the quiet click as one gear finds another and, suddenly, motion becomes smooth.

This is where the victory speech in Alexander’s parable stops sounding like fantasy and starts sounding like systems theory with a soul. “What do you think I’ve been doing?” She says. It’s not bravado; it is a description of co-emergent work. She has been pairing drives with counter-drives, incentives with constraints, speed with deliberation, power with accountability—until the old attractor basin, the race-to-the-bottom, drains into a new one : mutual reinforcement. She has been nudging the landscape so that cooperation becomes locally rational as well as morally compelling. When enough basins flip, the field itself feels different. You can still defect, still dominate, still extract—but it gets harder, costlier, lonelier. The third thing ripens when the easiest way to win is to help the whole win.

And again, remember : Arda Healed does not erase the elder sister. Growth remains, but under new governance: growth of depth rather than mere extent, growth of competence rather than throughput, growth of aliveness rather than volume. Competition remains, but between better versions of the same service; mastery remains, but of craft and self instead of neighbor; even conquest remains, as conquest of the unknown. We are not speaking in euphemisms. We are stumbling into the sober recognition that the same heat that forged swords can temper plowshares, and that the forge itself should not be smashed, but apprenticed.

At human scale, co-emergence is the feeling that your sovereignty and the world’s coherence are no longer at odds. You become more yourself the more you are in right relation. The musician’s virtuosity is impossible without the ensemble; the craftsperson’s pride dissolves into the grain of the wood; the scientist’s ego is eaten, properly, by a result anyone can replicate. The elder sister’s energies—ambition, hunger, territoriality—are not denied; they are married to forms that make them harmless and, finally, helpful. You still want to excel; you now want to excel at making the commons stronger.

   At civilizational scale, co-emergence is the long unglamorous labor of re-patterning the built world so that the second goddess’s defaults are easier than the first’s reflexes. Energy systems that make conservation the path of least resistance. Legal architectures that internalize externalities by design. Financial instruments that price time and resources honestly so that long-term care outcompetes short-term extraction. Digital protocols whose openness is a moat no monopoly can cross. When these win on their own terms—cheaper, more reliable, more joyful—the third thing stops needing rhetoric. It becomes habitat.

At planetary scale, Gaia is already the third thing in embryo: a living coherence assembled out of a billion acts of appetite and a trillion acts of symbiosis, none of which knew the plan and all of which are the plan. The task is to align our intelliegence with the intelligence that is already operative. That is why the mystic traditions counsel non-forcing. You do not make the forest resilient by command; you stop clear-cutting, and the forest resumes being itself. You do not make a river healthy by decree; you remove what blocks its meandering, and the river carves its own path again. Wu wei is not inaction; it is co-emergence respected—agency exercised within the flow of the universe.

There is, finally, a temptation to sentimentalize Arda Healed, to imagine a terminus after which nothing breaks. But the healed world is alive, and aliveness implies perturbation, novelty, surprise. The difference is that shocks propagate through tissue that can flex; failure becomes information more often than catastrophe; tragedy happens, but tragedy no longer rules. The wounds remain, like the scars of the Only Son of God , but the wounds are now witnesses. They tell us what was risked, what was learned, what was won.

When The Goddess of Everything else speaks and says, “Go forth and do everything else,” she is not promising a frictionless heaven. She declares the end of a world built on competition, and the beginning of a culture that co-emerges with what is truest in us and around us. What Daniel Schmactenberger would call a “civilization emerging.” 

And you, my warrior, keep finding the hollows and filling them with water. Keep choosing the forms that make choosing them easier next time. The faith, if that’s still the right word, is to trust that the third thing is not a fantasy but a property of this universe, that when enough patterns lock, it spontaneously emerges.

Greater, and yet the same. 

Not a return. 

Not a surrender. 

A world that remembers everything—and sings.

_____________________

Some tell the story differently. In their telling, the world began in harmony — a flawless whole that was later wounded, and all the cruelty we see is just the echo of that wound. The task, in that version, is to heal the fracture, to get back what was lost.

Others imagine creation as a child — innocent, unfinished, growing toward maturity. The harshness of life isn’t the point of the story, just the grit needed to sharpen the blade. In time, they say, what is rough will be made smooth, and what is violent will be tempered into something worthy of the original intention.

But in this telling, the beginning is neither flawless nor innocent. Life’s first law was not harmony, but hunger. Eden existed beyond duality. The primordeal swamp was an arena. The beauty we dream of came later, not as a return to what once was, nor as the simple unfolding of what was already there, but as a countercurrent — something that arose inside the chaos and began to shape it into something else entirely.

It means that what we call “good” was never guaranteed. It had to be smuggled in, persuaded into being, piece by piece. And the strange truth is that it could not have appeared at all without the chaos to work on. The raw proliferation of the first law — the endless drive to multiply — was also the clay the second goddess needed. Without it, she would have had nothing to shape.

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In Taoist thought, all things arise from the interplay of two complementary forces — yin and yang. They are not enemies but partners, each containing the seed of the other. Darkness gives meaning to light; stillness defines movement; yielding can overcome the rigid. The circle that holds them is not a battlefield, but a whole.

The two goddesses can be seen in this way. The elder is yang at its most forceful — expansive, outward-driving, insistent on growth, dominance, and motion. The younger is yin in its most generative form — shaping, holding, harmonizing, drawing relationships out of raw multiplicity. But neither is pure; each contains a trace of the other. In the swamp, even Cancer’s hunger carried the seed of beauty. In the cities of cooperation, the second goddess still relies on the vitality that her sister’s drive provides.

Taoism cautions against imagining that one pole can simply erase the other. Harmony does not come from vanquishing yang or suppressing yin, but from letting them cycle, each giving way to the other at the right time. This is not a static balance — it is a living rhythm. The tide goes out; the tide comes in. The oak grows tall, then returns to the soil. The Tao is ineffible, and all things flow toward it.

If this is so, then perhaps the victory of the Goddess of Everything Else is not an end to her sister’s reign, but the restoration of their rightful dance. The elder will still create the conditions for conflict and competition; the younger will still turn them into connection and cooperation. Each needs the other to remain alive. Without the push, there is no growth. Without the shaping, there is no enduring form.

And the work, for those who would follow the second goddess, is to know when to yield, when to advance, and how to move with the turning of the whole.

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The Harmonic principles of  Coherence and Co-Emergence are guideposts in understanding the dynamic of the two sisters. In the living world, coherence is rarely decreed from above; it emerges in the gaps between competing interests when cooperation becomes the better strategy. That’s what the swamp scene illustrated in miniature — once single cells discovered they could do more together than apart, they locked in new possibilities. Those alliances became tissues, those tissues became bodies, those bodies became ecologies.

The same pattern repeats in human history, scaled up and refracted through politics, trade, and technology. As we said, Mongol Empire was not designed to be a conduit for global exchange; it was built to dominate. Yet once the steppe had been pacified under a single authority, a coherent network appeared: the Silk Road made travel safer than it had been in centuries, and created a shared set of rules that allowed merchants, messengers, and artisans to move without fear. Cooperation arose from the very infrastructure laid down for conquest.

Rome followed the same logic. As does our globalization — the post-war bargain of interdependence. It all fits this pattern. The system was designed to make nuclear war unthinkable by binding economies together. The result was a planetary-scale coherence: supply chains that spanned oceans, financial systems that synchronized markets across continents, communications infrastructure that tied states and corporations into a single, if fragile, network.

And the internet — born from military research — is perhaps the purest modern example. Its open protocols created coherence across every kind of difference: language, geography, ideology. That kind of interoperability is coherence made visible: a whole made stronger by the diversity of its parts.

In every case, the Goddess of Everything Else hihabited our desire to carry out the orders of Chaos. She aligned her aims with the machinery her sister had built for competition and expansion, bending those systems toward connection and mutual reliance. This is co-emergence: the pattern of cooperation arising inside a framework that was never designed to produce it, but cannot help doing so once the conditions are right. What does this teach us of the nature of life? The nature of the universe?

And so as this tale concludes, remember this, from the ashes of kill, consume, multiply and conquer arising the conditions for cooperation. From what feels like immanent ecological distruction arises the voice of the Goddess of Everything Else.

Are you listening? Can you hear it?

“Through long generations of suffering I chiseled and chiseled. Now finally nothing is left of the nature with which she imbued you. She never again will hold sway over you or your loved ones. I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. I won you by pieces and hence you will all be my children. You are no longer driven to multiply, conquer, and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of all ages.”