It’s Fundamentally Anti-Human

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

– Voltaire

No sentence better summarizes the social plight we humans face than that penned by Gregory Bateson: “the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”  As our centrally-directed, vertically-structured systems of institutionally-imposed order continue to reveal their destructive character, thoughtful minds are becoming increasingly aware that the rest of the universe functions in a quite orderly fashion, without the conscious design of political agencies, academicians, special interest-directed “experts,” and other self-appointed “authorities” over their fellow humans.

To the extent we identify ourselves (i.e., derive our sense of being, our sense of “who” we are) with external forces ((e.g., a tribe, nation, political system, religion, ideology, or other collective entity) our lives quite literally become an abstraction, an idea. The man who, at a business conference, introduced himself as “I am Xerox,” is an example of this syndrome. So, too, are the millions of men, women, and children, who have been carefully conditioned to think of themselves as indistinguishable from the political systems of whose purposes they are willing to kill or die. The person whose car is emblazoned with a bumper sticker that reads “proud parent of a Marine,” is advertising to the world that he or she has fulfilled their duty of helping to train their child to become a fungible resource for the owners of the state to dispose of as suits its interests. When Louis XIV reportedly declared “I am the state,” his words were, for him, a cost-free declaration with which he stood to profit from the millions of subservient French people for whom such an idea, internalized for themselves, was wholly destructive to their personal being.

Quantum physics is helping us discover the marginal nature of change. A pan of heated water becomes warmer not a result of a gradual, collective change in the water itself, but in individual molecules suddenly jumping (i.e., a “quantum leap”) from an unheated to a heated state. As more and more molecules make such individual changes, the pan of water becomes increasingly warmer. As we become more aware of the localized dynamics of how nature organizes and expresses its energies, we may one day discover how the merger of Darwinism (i.e., random genetic mutations) and Lamarckism (i.e., how changes within an organism can be passed on to descendants) might help us unlock the deeper secrets of evolutionary processes. In the geneticist’s motto, “cherish your mutations,” we might find the seedbed of a new paradigm.

The failures of collective, vertically-structured, institutional systems to provide their promised social order are abundant. They are, in fact, often encapsulated into pictures of what we like to think of as human history. Philosophies, religions, and ideologies that are forcibly imposed upon the minds of people rather than being the result of individual inquiries into the nature of humans in a complex universe have produced so much of human conflict and destructiveness. So, too, have political systems – grounded in divisiveness and defined by their monopolies on the use of violence – generated the wars, genocides, police brutalities, torture, and other anti-life practices that Randolph Bourne described as being “the health of the state.” If conflict and violence are expressions of the realities of nature, as we so thoughtlessly babble to ourselves, why need they be forced upon us? On the other hand, if our lives are made better by the individual pursuit of our self-interests, would it serve any purpose for the state to mandate such behavior? Is it not evident that the persistent destructiveness of the traditional model of social order illustrates Thomas Kuhn’s “failure of existing rules” to serve the well-being of all humanity? If civilizations have been created by individuals and destroyed by collectives, might life be better enhanced by rethinking who we are?

The post It’s Fundamentally Anti-Human appeared first on LewRockwell.