The City as an Organism

#7 Our World and The World

Why our sense of control is real, yet insignificant — and what it means to be the germ of civilization

There is our world, and there is the world.

Our world is the interior realm — the space of thoughts, emotions, decisions, relationships, and achievements. It’s the world we navigate daily, where meaning exists because we create it. In this world, we make choices. We build things. We cause things to happen. We act, and we believe those actions matter — because they do, at the scale in which our world operates.

But alongside this domain of subjective experience lies the world — the external, indifferent totality in which our experiences are embedded. This is the world of physical law, of metabolism and thermodynamics, of ecosystems and economies, of plate tectonics and planetary motion. It is the world that existed before we were born and will go on without us.

Our world and the world are not in conflict. They are not illusions versus truth. They are simply nested realities, coexistent but operating at different scales. And at the heart of their relationship lies a subtle and humbling paradox: the sense of control we feel in our world is both genuine and insignificant.

To explore this, imagine a mitochondrion inside a cell. It is a complex, autonomous unit. It takes in nutrients, produces energy, regulates internal processes, and even communicates with its surroundings. From the mitochondrion’s perspective — if it had one — it is alive and active. It plays a crucial role. And indeed it does: no cell can live without its mitochondria. In a meaningful way, the mitochondrion exerts control over its environment.

But zoom out. The mitochondrion does not control the cell. It does not decide what the cell does or what type of cell it becomes. It does not guide the organism’s development, nor does it determine its function in a body or its role in an ecosystem. The mitochondrion is a vital, but unremarkable, component in a larger system whose logic lies far beyond it.

This is our position in civilization.

We are the germ of civilization — the initiating element, the necessary seed, the part that enables the rest to grow. But like the mitochondrion, we do not control the whole. We do not direct civilization. It grows around us and through us, following patterns that emerge beyond our intention or awareness.

In our world, we choose careers, vote in elections, raise families, write books, build software, teach, heal, imagine. And we shape outcomes. We have a sphere of agency.

But civilization — the world — operates by forces that transcend individual will. No one plans the global economy. No one orchestrates the direction of scientific discovery. No one manages the feedback loops of population growth, resource depletion, technological escalation, cultural shifts. These are emergent phenomena, produced by billions of interacting components. They cannot be controlled by any of them. Not even by us — the germ of something far larger.

There is a deep relief in recognizing this. Our desire to control civilization — to steer its course, to manage its outcomes, to ensure its survival — is rooted in a kind of anthropocentric hubris. We imagine ourselves as the brain of the world, when we are its germ — essential, but not central.

This does not mean we are powerless. The mitochondrion matters. If it fails, the cell fails. And when enough cells fail, the organism dies. Likewise, the health and function of civilization depends on the local actions of its parts — on education, cooperation, creativity, sustenance. But participation is not the same as control.

To exist meaningfully is not to dominate the system but to serve it well — to carry out one's role with care, even if that role is small, even if the larger organism will never be fully visible to us.

In this view, the human drama is still rich, still real, but it is no longer center stage. We are part of something greater — not by virtue of our mastery, but by virtue of our embeddedness.

Our world will always feel like the world. But if we listen closely, we can hear the deeper rhythms of a civilization that is not ours, that is not for us — but of which we are a living part.

This article resonates with themes explored in The Metropolis Organism — a video series examining cities as literal biological systems, where human beings function not as masters, but as necessary organelles in a living urban body.