Survival is the same thing as stability
Philippe Beaudoin · August 16, 2026
Look at our planet. It’s been going its merry way around the sun for more than 4.5 billion years. If you were tempted to grant it a soul you’d say it survived all that time. If you granted it free will you’d say it strived to survive. But because we understand the dynamics of celestial bodies we simply say:
The Earth-Sun system is stable.
We can observe this shift countless times in human history. First we say things like: “The river fights the land to seek the ocean” or “Fire devours the forest to stay alive”. But once we understand the dynamics of a complex system we go from “X wants to survive” to “X and Y are a stable system”.
When we think of Earth as something that “survives” we think of the Sun as “part of the environment the Earth must survive in”. Once we understand celestial dynamics we see them both as part of a coupled system. Same with the river and the land, or the fire and the forest. We first think of them as a “thing that wants to survive” and “its environment”, but eventually we see that they are better understood as a joint system.
Understanding a system shifts our vocabulary from “survival” to “stability”, but why do we name the components of a system? Why do we name the Earth and the Sun? The river, the land, the fire, the forest? How did we come to agree that something warranted being called “a planet”?
I posit it’s precisely because we observed stable systems made of planets. It became natural to name the components of these systems because doing so allowed us to better predict the future. Because we named the Earth and the Sun and have an understanding of celestial dynamics we can plot our planet’s trajectory through space. That’s useful.
Naming things allows us to model the systems they participate in. We have an Earth/Sun model, a river/land model, a fire/forest model… By accumulation we end up with a model of the world. The fancy word philosophers use to talk about “a model of the world” is “an ontology”.
It’s pretty obvious that different groups have different ontologies. Christians, scientists, First Nations… We all see the world differently. We model it differently. We all have different ontologies.
And we resist change to our ontologies.
If someone truly believes a storm has a will of its own, they will resist the explanations of a scientist trying to convince them that “it’s just fluid dynamics”.
It’s normal. It’s healthy even. This is how we ensure we don’t revert back to ontologies that are less predictive, or less efficient at explaining the world.
Importantly, though, the more a word X influences our daily life, the more we resist taking it out of our ontology. This resistance can be extreme. To the point where just seeing someone else live their lives without X feels threatening. The first europeans who said “I don’t need God” could have testified to this.
There is a X all of us have in our ontologies. No matter where you were born. No matter your beliefs, you have it in your ontology:
Your self.
The name people use to talk to you. To talk about you to each other. You have your name in your ontology. And so do the people around you. And if they try to convince you it’s not needed you’ll resist. Hard. In fact, it hurts just seeing the people you know use your name less and less.
You resist “your self” dropping out of your ontology because if it did, there would be nothing left to even hold an ontology. If you did not resist you would no longer be driving the system towards stability.
The human collective is stable because social dynamics create a pressure that make our selves stick in other’s ontologies.
Or, since we don’t fully understand how humans work: our selves want to survive in other people’s ontologies.