The City as an Organism

 #5 Beneath the Skin: A Humbling View of Human Control

What if our sense of agency is just a flicker atop a biochemical ocean?

We live under the illusion that we are in control — of our lives, our bodies, even our civilization. But pause for a moment and ask: what truly keeps us alive?

It is not our intellect. It is not our willpower. It is what goes on beneath our skin.

Each second, millions of molecular interactions quietly coordinate to keep us breathing, digesting, healing, thinking. These processes don’t wait for our permission. We don’t direct them. Most of us barely understand them. And even with the full machinery of modern civilization — its labs, technologies, and medical systems — we are only beginning to scratch the surface of how our own metabolism works.

If we ask what governs this invisible activity, we arrive at DNA: a vast archive of instructions refined over billions of years. DNA doesn’t consult us. It doesn’t explain itself. Yet it builds and sustains us from within.

Picture it: an entire universe teeming under your skin, maintaining life with stunning precision, utterly beyond the reach of your conscious thought. Compared to this, the role of the human will is laughably minor. The most significant contribution many of us make to our survival is simply to eat three times a day.

And yet we speak as if we steer civilization, as if our ideas and actions are the prime movers of history. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge the deeper truth: civilization is not just a product of our minds. It is an extension of our bodies — driven, at its foundation, by the same unconscious forces that animate every cell.

This isn’t cause for despair. It’s a call to humility.

We are not gods. We are organisms.

And the more we understand that, the more clearly we might see the world — and ourselves — for what we truly are.

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.