Aha! A flash of inspiration while doing the dishes. Curious how certain mundane mechanical tasks get the gears moving. Right then; now to get down in words this picture before it fades.
There's this tendency of living things to increase in complexity to a certain point in order to perpetuate themselves in the world. Of course we aren't talking about eternal progress. Certain branches of evolutionary chains hit relatively stable plateaus that will probably remain stable provided the environment stays relatively stable in turn.
Human beings themselves hit these incredible spurts of growth and innovation and then the process tapers off and whatever structures were built crumble, to be replaced with new structures that will of course borrow from the old. It is never a complete reset. We progress like the tide, ever-spiraling upwards but crashing at certain peaks and sloshing down to begin anew.
How did this process start? Strange thinking about it: each of us a packet of energy built up by incredibly complex organic arrangements...packets of energy working with other packets of energy in order to absorb still other packets of energy in turn, all to maintain existence. With the Big Bang came a radiation of energy outwards, culminating in our motley lot with our cellphones and tablet PCs and whatnot. Little delicate creatures like us...children of an ancient cosmic explosion. We carry on the old logic, the logic of the radiation and perpetuation outwards of energy into a void. And now here we are, organized intelligence self-constructing a better vessel to perpetuate ourselves with.
It is all culminating in these incredibly complex brains of ours, themselves giving birth to this strange, insectile technological tissue. Technology seems organic to me anyways. We don't consider the web of the spider or the venom sacks of the rattlesnake unnatural, yet such organs wouldn't exist without the purpose of a living vessel with which to serve. Molecules with their electrons arranged in certain structures, structures that act on others to bind physical materials or separate them or break them down, depending on purpose. But I suppose I am going off track.
I find myself obsessively returning to this question of modern madness and its relation to our modern social systems. We produce madness. You could even say that our social totality has gone mad itself: here we sit as a large section of our society perpetuates the destruction of not only the cradle from which we grew but the very tissue of our own selves. Individual madness could be said to be born out of the pathological behavior of an errant emotional system: each person's emotional landscape can hitch itself to certain arbitrary objects of worship, objects of worship that can lead to all sorts of psychic pain upon the lack of fulfillment. We each have an emotional culture so to speak which is in danger of becoming pathological. In the same way, the very relations and functions of our social culture is resulting in great destruction. This madness reproduces itself in fractal patterns throughout our interconnected, nested systems.
We've come so far in the evolutionary chain to a point of great complexity; it is a shame this has to happen now. But certainly it is the way the physical world works. I think it was Hindu metaphysics that posited that life tends to hide from itself. It branches out in increasing complexity...perhaps in order to better manipulate the world in order to perpetuate its own bounded systems. However the further life branches out, each of the nodes working together in whatever vehicle takes shape become further removed from each other, until they can no longer collectively communicate the holistic messages required to sustain the entire structure.
So here we are. Our collective vehicle initially formed around a mechanistic, individualistic conception of society that worked decently for a while - well it solved the problem of decaying traditional institutions and broke the stranglehold the old churches had on the state - but now it is breaking down, with each individual zig-zagging away from the center, some completely powerless, while the rest of the power pools uselessly in a select few.
There's always that nagging question: what is to be done? To struggle towards a new conception of society of course. What is this new society going to look like? Many think that as the cheap energy runs out and the old industrial mechanisms unravel, there will be a decentralization and localization of political concentration. The consensus process currently being practiced by various radical political groups offers promise for a new model of government. Of course such processes work best on a small scale, which lines up nicely with the likelihood of fragmentation after the old empire falls. Which it will. It is looking very weak these days.
And what of the subjective experience of these changes? When this individualistic society was flourishing our consciousness was focused on our own selves and our relation to others. We would orient ourselves to become whatever figure we deemed both sympathetic to our own aspirations and collectively revered by greater society. But it seems to me like this focus is beginning to become inverted. As power continues to drain from each of us and an individual weakness sets in, we become concerned about the others around us.
We glance nervously at those around us, wondering what they must think, as we are no longer sure we can actualize ourselves as the old archetypes. And why should we? Such archetypes were from another time. There is no material power left to be the old individual. And as we become increasingly focused on others, we begin to see some things. Wow! It seems that above and beyond the fact that what people think about us matters to us, how other people behave actually alters the surrounding conditions in which our own individuality is expressed! The piece is getting long, so let's tackle that another time. But I'd like to end with this: our attention should re-align its focus from our selves to others. How to re-establish communication? How to re-align disparate skill sets? If a man or woman has a weakness, how can another's strength supplement that? And how can the very strengths of the ostensibly weak be harnessed in turn to reciprocate and to supplement those hidden weaknesses of the ostensibly strong?
So much to think about. There always is.
