A New Standalone Book
by Bruno Cesare Antonio Sebastiani
CANCERISM
Why Humanity Is Earth’s Malignancy
Cancerism is a new, unpublished work conceived as a standalone book for the international English-language market.
It brings together, reorganizes, and substantially develops the central ideas explored across The Planet’s Cancer series, presenting the theory for the first time as a single continuous argument.
The book does not require any previous knowledge of the seven-volume series. It is conceived as a new point of entry into Cancerism: a self-contained work that follows the theory from its evolutionary foundations to the ecological and technological dilemmas of the present.
Cancerism is a work of big-idea nonfiction that reinterprets human evolution, civilization, and ecological collapse through a single biological model: humanity behaves toward the biosphere in ways strikingly similar to the behavior of malignant cells within a living organism.
The book begins with a reversal of one of civilization’s most deeply rooted assumptions. The exceptional development of the human brain is normally regarded as evolution’s greatest achievement. Cancerism asks whether that same development may also have been the event that enabled one species to escape many of the regulatory constraints governing the rest of life and to transform the planet according to its own needs.
Human intelligence gave rise to abstraction, language, technology, agriculture, cities, science, industry, global networks, and artificial intelligence. But those same capacities also enabled unprecedented population growth, appropriation of resources, invasion of ecosystems, destruction of biodiversity, and the progressive transformation of the biosphere into an environment increasingly organized around the requirements of a single species.
A Structural, Not a Moral, Analogy
Cancerism does not argue that human beings are evil.
Cancer cells are not evil either. They are ordinary cells whose behavior has been altered in ways that make them proliferate, invade surrounding tissues, appropriate resources, evade regulatory mechanisms, and ultimately threaten the organism on which their own survival depends.
The analogy proposed by Cancerism is therefore structural rather than moral. The central questions concern behavior, expansion, and consequences—not guilt or intention.
From this perspective, the abnormal evolution of the human brain can be interpreted as a form of planetary carcinogenesis: the evolutionary event that transformed one component of the biosphere into a species capable of acting increasingly outside the constraints that had previously maintained ecological relationships among living organisms.
One Model for a Fragmented Crisis
The contemporary ecological crisis is usually described through separate categories: climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, overpopulation, resource depletion, deforestation, technological acceleration, and the destabilization of natural systems.
Cancerism asks whether these are really separate problems.
Instead, it proposes that they may be understood as different manifestations of the same underlying process: the extraordinary expansion of one species within a finite living system.
Seen in this way, climate change is not the disease itself. Nor is deforestation, industrial agriculture, mass extinction, urbanization, or resource depletion. They are symptoms of a broader transformation whose central dynamic is expansion.
From Human Evolution to Planetary Disease
The book follows this process across the entire arc of human development—from early hominin evolution to Homo sapiens, from the emergence of symbolic thought to agriculture and cities, and from states and empires to industrial civilization, global technological networks, artificial intelligence, and the possible emergence of superintelligence.
Human history is therefore reconsidered through a biological lens. Processes normally described as stages of civilization can also be read as stages in the progression of a malignancy: latency, proliferation, invasion, dissemination, loss of differentiation, and eventual destabilization of the host system.
The Argument
The Abnormal Evolution of the Human Brain
The first step is evolutionary. Cancerism identifies the exceptional development of the human brain as the origin of the process. At some point in human evolution, intelligence ceased merely to improve adaptation to the environment and began to give our ancestors the capacity to alter the environment itself.
Leaving the State of Nature
There was no single moment when humanity left nature behind. Toolmaking, bipedalism, meat consumption, fire, language, symbolic thought, and genetic changes formed part of a long process through which human beings acquired an increasing capacity to override environmental constraints.
The Memory of the Fall
Cancerism also examines ancient myths of humanity’s “Fall”—from Mesopotamian traditions to Genesis and Prometheus—as symbolic memories of a transition from an earlier condition of natural integration toward knowledge, labor, separation, and domination.
Humanity and Malignant Neoplasms
The central biological comparison examines the defining characteristics of malignant tumors: uncontrolled proliferation, invasion, appropriation of resources, destruction of surrounding tissues, evasion of regulatory mechanisms, metastasis, and dedifferentiation.
Cancerism asks whether population growth, territorial expansion, agriculture, deforestation, urbanization, imperial expansion, globalization, and ecological homogenization display comparable structural patterns at the planetary scale.
The Progression of the Disease
Civilization is then reconsidered historically. Agriculture, organized states, religious and philosophical systems, scientific revolutions, industrialization, fossil fuels, mass production, global communications, and artificial intelligence progressively increased humanity’s ability to transform the planet.
From the perspective of Cancerism, what civilization calls “progress” may therefore also be interpreted as an acceleration of the underlying process.
The Paradox of Intelligence
The argument finally returns to the faculty with which it began.
Human intelligence has become powerful enough to manipulate immensely complex natural systems, but that does not mean it is powerful enough to understand or reconstruct them. Artificial intelligence and possible future superintelligence may expand our capacities still further—but they may also become the most powerful instruments yet created by the same expansionary process.
What if the intelligence that made humanity dominant is also what made its domination pathological?
A New Standalone Book
Cancerism brings the central ideas developed across The Planet’s Cancer series into a single, newly organized work.
Rather than requiring readers to follow the theory through several books written at different stages of its development, the new project reconstructs its central argument as one continuous narrative: from the evolutionary origin of human exceptionalism to the ecological consequences of civilization and the technological dilemmas of the present.
It is therefore conceived as a standalone book, accessible without prior knowledge of the seven-volume series, while representing the most concentrated formulation of the theory developed through those earlier works.
Where the Book Sits
Cancerism is intended for readers of ambitious nonfiction concerned with human evolution, the history of civilization, ecological collapse, technological development, and the long-term future of humanity.
Its intellectual territory intersects with works by Yuval Noah Harari, Jared Diamond, Elizabeth Kolbert, David Wallace-Wells, James C. Scott, David Graeber, and David Wengrow. Like these authors, the book addresses humanity at the broadest historical scale. Its distinguishing feature is the use of a single biological model—the dynamics of malignancy—as an organizing principle for interpreting the trajectory of human civilization.
