Humans tend to focus on the short term, even if the longer term contains major costs. Most humans seem to believe that a technological exit from paying the long-term costs will be ‘discovered’ and patented
In an era where carefully curated personas dominate discourse and uncomfortable truths are sanitised for mass consumption, one voice has refused to compromise for nearly five decades. David L Hawk stands as a testament to intellectual courage, a thinker who has spent his career diagnosing humanity’s fatal flaws while acknowledging his own participation in the species’ collective shortcomings.
“Since we are all human beings then the problems out there are probably related to the problems in here,” Hawk reflects with characteristic directness. This philosophy of self-critique before world-critique forms the foundation of his work at the Center for Corporate Rehabilitation, where he has spent over two decades challenging the fundamental assumptions that drive business, economics, and human behaviour toward inevitable collapse.
His journey from witnessing environmental destruction on his father’s farm to advising CEOs of major corporations, from facing military trial in Vietnam to debating China’s leadership selection council, reveals a mind that refuses to accept convenient visions of what is. Where others see progress, Hawk sees entropy marketed as innovation. Where others celebrate human achievement, he sees a species chronically unable to operate in the “now,” paralysed by arrogance disguised as confidence.
THE FARM, THE WAR, AND THE AWAKENING
The seeds of Hawk’s worldview were planted in soil his father deemed expendable. Growing up on a farm, young David witnessed an attitude towards nature that foreshadowed humanity’s larger trajectory. “Agriculture was a business that required destruction of the nature that would get in the way. Trees stole the water for his corn and must be destroyed,” he recalls of his father’s philosophy.
This early exposure to humanity’s war against its own life support system crystallised into something far darker during two years in Vietnam. There, Hawk watched humans kill nature, each other, and themselves with systematic efficiency. The defining moment came during a battle where he refused to kill women and children, leading to a military trial. His defence consisted of a single sentence that would become his life’s thesis: “We, the unwilling, led by the unqualified, to kill the unfortunate, die for the ungrateful.”
That sentence contains multitudes. It speaks to the absurdity of hierarchy, the failure of leadership, the targeting of the vulnerable, and the ingratitude of those who benefit from others’ sacrifices. These themes would reappear throughout Hawk’s career as he applied the same unflinching analysis to corporate boardrooms that he once applied to battlefields.
THE PROPHET IGNORED: CLIMATE WARNINGS FROM 1975
Between 1975 and 1977, Hawk conducted climate research involving twenty companies and six government agencies. The findings were unequivocal and terrifying. The heads of these organisations understood completely that climate change was approaching due to human behaviour. Their response should have changed history.
Instead, it revealed the fundamental dysfunction of human systems. “Their boards of directors and elected supervisors, and the wider public, didn’t care,” Hawk explains. “The leaders I worked with were thus mostly replaced, such as the CEO of Exxon and his Chief Scientist, by their Boards.”
This moment captures the tragedy of our era. Those with knowledge and authority to act were removed by those who preferred profitable ignorance. Hawk identifies the core problem: “Humans tend to focus on the short term, even if the longer term contains major costs. Most humans seem to believe that a technological exit from paying the long-term costs will be ‘discovered’ and patented.”
This magical thinking, this faith in perpetual technological salvation, has become the unofficial religion of modern civilisation. Hawk’s early warnings were not ignored because they were wrong. They were ignored because they were inconvenient, and inconvenience has always been humanity’s red line.
ADAM SMITH, EUNICE NEWTON FOOTE, AND CHARLES DARWIN: THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANS IN SEARCH OF SUICIDE
Hawk traces the roots of “Business as Usual” to two dangerous assumptions and one sign of hope in human consciousness. The first is a dangerous assumption from Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations and its “passion for the search for individualised greed while ignoring the costs to other humans and species.” Published as the USA was being born, this philosophy, Hawk argues, “was suicidal to life from its inception.”
Second is a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856 of phenomenal research by Eunice Newton Foote. Now seen as the first knowledge of the cause of climate change for the human future, she was not allowed as a woman to give her presentation. Sitting next to her at the conference was a male scientist who was asked to present her study.
Third is the general misreading of Charles Darwin’s 1859 book that led many humans to believe they are “highly gifted and the most important species in life. As such, they can do no wrong as they evolve to become ever smarter via sex, births and development.”
To counter the Darwin delusion, Hawk invokes black hole physicist Stephen Hawking: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.”
These intellectual frameworks provided by Smith and Darwin are taught in every economics department, biology programme and business school. As such it has created a civilisation structurally incapable of responding to its own existential threats. The flaws in our industrial model are not bugs to be fixed but features intentionally designed by those who valued short-term individual gain over long-term collective survival. The phenomena science of Foote was ignored for more than a century until Exxon Corporation discovered it during their early climate change research. A Chief scientist of Exxon, Black, and Hawk came to consider her a Joan of Arc II in bringing light onto their 1975 research. Except for two male scientists that plagiarised parts of her work it had been mostly lost until Exxon scientists found it.
THE BOOK AMAZON COULDN’T CATEGORISE
In 1979, Hawk published research on climate change. When a publishing house proposed republishing it decades later, they requested a clearer title. Hawk’s suggestion: “Humans are Fucked.” The editor promised never to speak with him again, then bragged at conferences about burying him.
Another publisher loved the title and republished it as “Sorry, Humans are Fucked” under the pseudonym “Hawkeye.” An Amazon manager, offended by the title, placed it in the candles section. “I thanked his genius for finding a way to sell more candles,” Hawk recalls. The furious manager then moved it to “T-shirts with dirty words on them.” It sold very well, contributing to that manager’s termination.
Eventually, Amazon republished it under Hawk’s real name, removing the apologetic “sorry” from the title. The entire saga illustrates Hawk’s point about censorship and society’s tolerance for uncomfortable truths. We prefer our doom served with politeness, our extinction warnings wrapped in optimistic framing. Raw honesty about our trajectory remains the ultimate taboo.
LEADERSHIT, STRATEGY AS DECEIT, AND THE TYRANNY OF HIERARCHY
In 2007, Hawk participated in a televised debate with China’s Experts Council, the body responsible for selecting leaders of state-owned firms and the nation’s presidency. His message was characteristically confrontational: dump Confucius and return to Lao Tzu’s wisdom. “For Lao Tzu a leader takes responsibility for what goes wrong and when things turn out well says: ‘They did it, I had little to do with it.’”
This philosophy stands in stark contrast to Western leadership models, which Hawk dismisses as “leadershit.” The term is not mere provocation but precise diagnosis. Modern leadership celebrates ego, demands credit, deflects blame, and creates elaborate hierarchies to justify inequality.
Hawk’s assault extends to the concept of strategy itself. “I avoid the term as the man most responsible for its use in business, Carl Clausewitz, called it deceit in chapter nine of his classic book.” From advising CEOs, Hawk notes that most who understood this abandoned strategic planning language in favour of something radical: honesty.
When asked what should replace strategic thinking, his answer is disarmingly simple: “We might try ‘honesty’ and ‘openness.’ Then, if this seems too complicated, we can shift to simply: ‘Being Nice.’” He cites IKEA as an example where this approach worked well.
Hierarchy itself, Hawk argues, is an “artificial construct used by most humans to make sense of what they don’t understand. In nature there is no hierarchy, nor in the universe.” It exists solely to justify control and compensation inequality, taught as natural law in MBA programmes despite being, in his assessment, “bullshit.”
DIMENSIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: FROM POINTLESSNESS TO THE BEYOND
Hawk’s dimensional framework offers a mathematical rather than hierarchical understanding of human consciousness. Most humans, he observes, “dwell in the 1st dimension while working in the 2nd dimension on their cell phones and watching their TVs, all to ‘see more.’”
The third dimension represents Mother Nature, a source of hope that humans largely ignore. The fourth dimension brings Father Time, entropy, and death, the ultimate teacher that humans desperately try to avoid. The fifth dimension is “quite special, very spiritual, anti-religious, and relies on quantum physics to begin to understand. It is ‘beyond’ humans.”
Hawk once lectured on these dimensions and climate change alongside Carl Sagan in 1980. There exists even a minus zero dimension, which Hawk calls “pointlessness,” the natural habitat of politicians and their lectures on “The Point Is.”
This framework challenges the notion that more information, more technology, more AI represents progress. Instead, Hawk sees humanity trapped in lower dimensions of consciousness, using technology to avoid rather than embrace deeper understanding.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE VERSUS NATURAL INTELLIGENCE
Hawk’s concern about AI stems from its origins: “AI emerges from those who want to make the non-rational more rational, and thus manage, i.e., sell, it.” In his worldview, reality consists of approximately 85% non-rational, 10% rational, and 5% irrational.
“The non-rational comes from poetry, aesthetics, music, life,” he explains. “If you want to access it, please listen to music to discover its qualities beyond the rational.” The rational, meanwhile, “is very humorous as it shelters the silly.” The irrational emerges from “humans pushing the rational too far into the non-rational,” manifesting in failed leadership and strategic mistakes.
One of Hawk’s daughters works in AI for Apple. One of his students in China designed an alternative AI using only 6% of the energy and cost of conventional approaches. “Google has yet to recover from it,” Hawk notes with evident satisfaction.
The deeper issue is that AI, being fundamentally artificial and human-created, reinforces rather than transcends our limitations. It accelerates our ability to destroy what we don’t understand while providing the illusion of progress.
ENTROPY: THE UNIVERSE’S VERDICT ON HUMAN ECONOMICS
Modern economics, Hawk argues, markets negative entropy as humanity’s alternative to cosmic entropy. “It sells well with humans and cannot exist according to scientists like Einstein.” The use of this imaginary concept “speeds up natural entropy thus we have created climate change, which is entropic.”
This observation cuts to the heart of economic theory’s fundamental dishonesty. By pretending that human activity can somehow exempt itself from thermodynamic laws, economics has created models that guarantee destruction while claiming to measure progress. “Aren’t humans creative in their destruction of what they don’t understand?” Hawk asks.
The question is rhetorical but devastating. Creativity applied to self-deception accelerates catastrophe. Our ingenuity in inventing reasons why physical laws don’t apply to us has brought us to the edge of uninhabitability.
WHAT TREES KNOW THAT UNIVERSITIES DON’T
At the end of a joint lecture with Carl Sagan at the 1980 World’s Future Conference in Toronto, Hawk and Sagan were asked a question they loved. A woman in the audience challenged their “manly arrogance in thinking humans were the smartest and most knowledgeable species in the universe.” She recommended they “not only talk with trees, plants and animals but with rocks and minerals about what was and what will be.”
“Carl and I loved her insights,” Hawk recalls. “Many scientists are following it by seeking rocks and minerals from outer space. The Chinese seek them from the moon as a beginning in the search for knowledge.”
This anecdote illustrates the profound limitation of human institutions, including universities. We have organised knowledge around human categories, human timescales, human priorities. Trees operate on century timescales. Rocks remember millennia. The universe thinks in billions of years. Our institutions can barely plan beyond quarterly earnings.
NATIONALISM: SECURITY THEATRE FOR A DYING SPECIES
Hawk views nationalism as part of broader cultural restrictions on human thought and research. “I prefer change, which is essential to life. I have long worked with getting over nations, states, cities as crucial to being and knowing.”
His opposition to nationalism is not ideological abstraction but lived experience. “Nationalism was the basis for the killing I saw in Vietnam.” More practically, he notes that “climate change will remove all signs of nationalism as nation states will no longer be allowed borders by natural change of oceans, weather, availability of food, retention of shelters, and maintenance of infrastructures.”
Nationalism fulfils a psychological need for identity and security, but “nationalism as security is obviously a bad idea. It’s too often used as a basis for war that should never be.”
The borders we fight to maintain will be erased by rising seas and collapsing ecosystems. Our tribal identities will provide no protection against atmospheric physics. The question is whether we abandon these artificial divisions voluntarily or wait for nature to do it for us.
BEING NICE: THE MOST RADICAL SURVIVAL STRATEGY
Hawk’s emphasis on “being nice” is frequently misunderstood as naive moralism. In fact, it represents his most ruthlessly pragmatic recommendation. “Humans have learned from various books, movies and leadershit speeches that being nice is being weak,” he observes.
Returning to Lao Tzu’s wisdom reveals “the basis of opposite thinking. Most humans, most of the time, avoid thinking thus wisdom got buried under war, wealth, and hatred of difference.”
When advising IKEA, Hawk recommended honesty, openness, and being nice. “It worked well.” This success stands in stark contrast to the elaborate strategic frameworks, competitive positioning models, and aggressive market domination philosophies taught in business schools.
The misunderstanding of kindness as weakness may be humanity’s most fatal error. In a world facing existential threats requiring unprecedented cooperation, we have built systems that reward aggression and punish collaboration. We have mistaken our survival strategy for our extinction protocol.
PUBLIC VERSUS PUBIC: A DIFFERENCE THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE
Looking towards 2026 and beyond, Hawk identifies one shift in consciousness that would give him genuine hope: burying the differences we invest massive time and resources in creating and maintaining such as racial, economic, political, and educational divisions.
Instead, he recommends seeking “differences that make a difference in life of the longer term, not minute by minute.” His favourite distinction, particularly when working with youth: “Public” versus “Pubic.”
“Public interest is in the reality that is out and up, with a concentration on others. Pubic interest is with the down and in, with its concentration on self and the glorification of such.” He suggests comparing political candidates via this distinction.
In 1964, Hawk used this framework in an architectural design project at school. “The teacher wanted to fail me, but a very famous architect who was on the final jury loved the clarity and adopted me. He then helped me for twenty years to find better ways of doing the right things.”
This anecdote captures Hawk’s career trajectory. Those committed to conventional thinking try to silence him. Those capable of genuine thought recognise the value of his clarity and adopt him as colleague, not enemy.
THE LEGACY OF AN UNCOMPROMISING MIND
David L Hawk’s five-decade career challenges every comfortable assumption about progress, intelligence, and human destiny. From Vietnam battlefields to corporate boardrooms, from climate research in the 1970s to consciousness frameworks in 2026, he has maintained unwavering commitment to truth over palatability.
His work at the Center for Corporate Rehabilitation continues this mission, though the name itself suggests the scale of the challenge. Corporations, like the civilisation they represent, require not minor adjustments but fundamental rehabilitation. The patient, however, remains largely unaware of the diagnosis.
Hawk’s influence extends through former students designing energy-efficient AI systems in China, through CEOs who abandoned “strategy” for honesty, through anyone who has encountered his work and found permission to question everything. His books, despite or perhaps because of their confrontational titles, have reached audiences hungry for unfiltered analysis.
As we move deeper into 2026, with climate change accelerating and human systems showing increasing strain, Hawk’s early warnings look less like pessimism and more like prophecy. The leaders he worked with in the 1970s were replaced for taking climate science seriously. Their replacements have given us decades of denial and delay.
The question Hawk poses is not whether humans will survive, but whether we deserve to. Can a species this committed to self-deception, this hostile to uncomfortable truth, this invested in short-term gain over long-term survival, justify its continued existence?
“Are humans lazy, or just tired?” he asks. The answer may determine everything. If we are merely tired, rest and renewal remain possible. If we are fundamentally lazy in our thinking, too comfortable in our delusions, too attached to our hierarchies and nationalisms and strategic deceits, then Hawk’s diagnosis stands: humans are fucked, and the “sorry” is optional.
Yet even in his most scathing assessments, Hawk models the self-critique he demands of others. “Since we are all human beings then the problems out there are probably related to the problems in here.” He argues with human idiots while being one himself, maintaining intellectual humility even as he delivers devastating critiques.
This combination of uncompromising analysis and radical self-honesty makes Hawk’s voice essential as we navigate the consequences of decades of ignored warnings. Whether humanity finds the wisdom to change course or continues its trajectory toward entropy, Hawk will be there, documenting our choices with unflinching clarity.
“Many humans are nice,” he notes, “especially the silent ones that smile. Avoid the noisy ones that smile, unless you need to laugh.”
In that observation lies both judgment and invitation. We can continue performing niceness while pursuing destruction, or we can embrace genuine niceness as survival strategy. We can remain noisy and empty, or we can cultivate the quiet wisdom that might yet save us.
The choice, as always, is ours. The question is whether we still have time to make it.
