Awakening Human Civilization

Preface | Lost in the Light of Cognition: Why Civilization Needs a Fundamental Awakening Throughout the long course of human history, “ignorance” has long constituted the primary boundary of civilizational development. A lack of understanding of natural laws, misjudgments about the structure of the universe, and ambiguity regarding humanity’s own position forced humans to rely on experience, intuition, and trial and error, advancing slowly under limited cognitive conditions. However, since the Scientific Revolution, this situation has undergone a fundamental transformation. From Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric system, to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, to modern physics’ deep revelations of micro and cosmic structures, humanity has gradually moved away from a self-centered worldview and constructed a knowledge system grounded in objective laws. The growth of knowledge has expanded humanity’s capacity to understand the world at an unprecedented rate, compressing the realm of the “unknown” to a significant extent. Intuitively, such cognitive expansion should lead to a more rational, stable, and sustainable form of civilization. Yet reality presents an inverse structure: ecosystems continue to degrade, climate risks keep rising, resource consumption accelerates, and social systems, despite increasing interconnectedness, exhibit greater instability. A deeper issue is that these crises do not arise from “ignorance,” but unfold within the realm of the “known.” Humanity not only recognizes the existence of these problems but also understands their mechanisms and consequences at a scientific level. Yet the overall structure of civilization continues along its established trajectory, unable to undergo fundamental transformation. This phenomenon suggests that the core problem of contemporary civilization is no longer a lack of knowledge, but rather an expanding structural gap between knowledge and reality. Humanity is no longer in a state of ignorance, but in a condition of “cognitive sufficiency coupled with structural mismatch.” This mismatch first manifests as an asymmetry between cognitive structures and complex systems. Human cognition primarily evolved in local, short-term, and low-complexity environments, whereas modern civilization operates within global-scale, highly coupled, and long-duration complex systems. When local rationality is embedded within an overall system, it may no longer produce rational outcomes, but instead become a driver of structural imbalance. Second, this mismatch appears as a disjunction between knowledge and behavior. Modern science can explain the world but does not directly determine behavior. Behavior is constrained by institutional structures, technological pathways, and cultural inertia. Within such a multi-layered system, even if individuals fully “know the correct answer,” the overall system may still evolve along suboptimal or even dangerous trajectories. Third, this mismatch is reflected in humanity’s misrecognition of its own position. Although modern science has long revealed that humanity is not the center of the universe, in real-world institutions and behavioral logic, humans still implicitly occupy a central position, treating nature as an external object and the world as a resource system available for unlimited exploitation and transformation. This shift in cognitive coordinates gradually detaches civilization from the natural constraints upon which it depends. Based on the above analysis, this book advances a core judgment: the crisis of contemporary civilization is essentially a systemic structural mismatch—the inconsistency among cognitive structures, behavioral mechanisms, and real-world constraints. This mismatch is not accidental, but the result of the int