Awake, They Sleep
As a culture, we live like somnambulists. One thing is we have traded our power of decision, in our non-democracies, for security; for the knowledge that there are people who "take decisions" while we get to have more time for... things. We also live with the implicit belief that, in the information age, all that we have to do is "be connected" and the "right" information will just make its way to us, effortlessly. And with that information, we'll know what to do. If we don't, we can always just Google it! What's the difference? We are complacent and confused. "Awake, they sleep," as Heraclitus put it.
We know a lot about little. We're well-suited for trivia games. But we don't know much in the realm of the useful and salutary. We don't remember much, because it's always a click away anyway, so why would would we go through the effort of making our brains use long-term storage? We just want "the facts"; but hurry please, I have a lot of things to attend to. Time is money. If you could give me a TL;DR, I'd appreciate it! This appetite for information makes sense, it's not a superfluous need, but it is being massively exploited in the world we currently live in. We consume a lot of information, forget most of it, and fail to contextualize the little we do remember because at no point were we taught how to think.
As individuals, we are exhausted. A result of exploitation to be sure (half of the US population is living under the poverty line). But the most exhausted people are not necessarily poor, they are those who are in the grasps of auto-exploitation, of which many are rich (and what else can they do than try to accumulate more capital?). We exhaust ourselves. Why? That'd take a while to get into. I'd recommend reading The Burnout Society. But at bottom, it's because we are nothing but the internalization of others. A fundamental notion to understand. We are memory that acts (in vulgar terms). The extent of our capacities, of our relative freedom, if we wish to salvage this word, is the extent of what we can remember.
And what have we memorized? The various gratifying actions on the environment that we learned to perform (which we will seek to repeat). A memory is always with relation to something -- an object or a person -- that can gratify us, within our environmental niche. Self-gratification is not some trivial desire, not something to be equated with some notion of an ego that we should transcend, but a fundamental notion: it is the work of sentient beings, the biological equilibrium they permanently seek (homeostasis, which can be restrained or generalized). The finality (in a cybernetic sense) of which is no less than the maintenance of our being, and that is true of all living things.
What we have been, up to now, aside from this bundle of biological needs to be met, is this hodgepodge of sociocultural automatisms, of which are the value judgments (prejudices) that serve the sole purpose to maintain the hierarchical structures that make up our societies. The principles of productivism, of contribution, of work-for-the-sake-of-X are imprinted from an early age and never doubted. Religious dogma persists even when we discard the Gods, and serve the same purpose as them. The vacuum is filled by all sorts of Manichean (Good vs. Evil) systems of thought, or the worship of money and power. One replacement has been the belief in "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"; few seemingly aware that our usage of these loaded words have only ever served the interests of the dominant, or those wishing to become dominant.
Laborit suggested we replace those words with "Knowledge, Conscience, Imagination". The distinguishing characteristics of homo sapiens come from the development of the last evolved part of his brain, the neo-cortex. This development separates us from other animals (as a matter of degrees, not kind), but its repression and redirection towards creation for the sake of profit leads us to our ruin, and that of all other species along with it. With our creative imagination -- the ability to make associations and abstractions, we receive (through language and culture) the ability to understand and create new working hypotheses, models and structures, and operate a mise en forme ("shaping") of our environment. Using technical information, we have transformed our environment in a way other species could not. But socially, we have done little of any worth. Whatever we can say about capitalism, however we wish to critique it, it remains that it was favorable for the development of technical information. Less thermodynamic energy became needed to achieve the same result: we became more efficient. But that technical information now threatens homo sapiens. Why?
Because we have failed to realize a common project, which can only be done through the development and propagation of generalized information. Without generalized information, we fail to think systemically, to see the interdependence--the dynamic structures--that rule us, and to include our social (group/sub-group) structures within its greater whole (every level of organization having its underlying and overlying levels). This despite the fact that we depend on each other's survival since the Neolithic period, which gave rise to specialization, and despite the fact that the same threats now threaten all of our survival: nuclear war, climate change, advances in A.I, the increasing centralization of power, etc.
Still, we don't care about the species; we think close and short-term, because that's how we have been taught to organize our lives, to serve nothing but profit. And because our care for others only extends to the protection of our molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid, or those who will allow us to protect them and those we have thrown into the future. But on the topic of those molecules, which we are so attached to--this immortality project--how much of our genetic code is left after three generations? 12.5%. Not very much. Seven generations? Less than 1%. So much for immortality. We have known about auto-reproduction for a long time, but we have neglected the fundamental concepts of auto-(re)organisation and auto-production.
And even those who do think about such things as "the future of our species", once they bring it up (in an ideological setting), they are rarely doing something else than expressing the content of their unconscious to serve their own ends, not the species'. But if we can speak of goals, of finality (teleonomy) then we have to come to the realization that the goal is to align both: that our self-gratifying actions also serve our societies, that our societies serve nations, that nations come together to serve our species and planet which we all rely upon to exist -- all of which retroacts (feeds-back) on the individual (as it always has). We cannot separate ourselves from this multi-level loop. Currently, this is a positive feedback loop, it increases entropy, amplifies disorder, due to its having allocated work for the wrong finality (profit rather than survival) which will lead to the collapse of not only this system, but possibly all of Earth's systems.
We were never educated to be humans who understand ourselves and who could be able to cooperate to prevent this; we were never taught how to make use of our creative imagination. And to come full circle, productivist/informational societies only encourage the propagation of specialized, professional information, not generalized information. That is why we cannot rely on "being connected". The information most of us receive most of the time is noise. It's a distraction for a product or you are the product as your attention is captivated for profit. Or, often, it's what helps in the immediate, at the cost of the future, because we have been pushed to our limits and that is all we can seem to pay attention to now if we want to just survive and not be too depressed and unable to get out of bed in the morning.
What can be done? Well, ironically, a lot can be done by doing less. You free yourself by fleeing from hierarchical structures of dominance, as much as possible. Find your pleasure elsewhere, through the imagination; or fight the excesses of power locally, or by creating decentralized networks that work internationally where generalized information can be shared, while it is still possible. You have to work, you have to go against the stream in order to understand things. But don't imagine that things will change until the masses have received the generalized information that they need in order to be aware of what they are, of the functioning of their nervous system, which so far has almost always only served to maintain hierarchical structures of dominance. More and more people will seek it out with the advent of climate change and its various crises. But it might be too late already, we may have been distracted for too long.
To my pessimistic and fatalistic friends, I quote the biologist Jean Rostand: "All hopes are permitted to Man, including the hope to disappear."
We know a lot about little. We're well-suited for trivia games. But we don't know much in the realm of the useful and salutary. We don't remember much, because it's always a click away anyway, so why would would we go through the effort of making our brains use long-term storage? We just want "the facts"; but hurry please, I have a lot of things to attend to. Time is money. If you could give me a TL;DR, I'd appreciate it! This appetite for information makes sense, it's not a superfluous need, but it is being massively exploited in the world we currently live in. We consume a lot of information, forget most of it, and fail to contextualize the little we do remember because at no point were we taught how to think.
As individuals, we are exhausted. A result of exploitation to be sure (half of the US population is living under the poverty line). But the most exhausted people are not necessarily poor, they are those who are in the grasps of auto-exploitation, of which many are rich (and what else can they do than try to accumulate more capital?). We exhaust ourselves. Why? That'd take a while to get into. I'd recommend reading The Burnout Society. But at bottom, it's because we are nothing but the internalization of others. A fundamental notion to understand. We are memory that acts (in vulgar terms). The extent of our capacities, of our relative freedom, if we wish to salvage this word, is the extent of what we can remember.
And what have we memorized? The various gratifying actions on the environment that we learned to perform (which we will seek to repeat). A memory is always with relation to something -- an object or a person -- that can gratify us, within our environmental niche. Self-gratification is not some trivial desire, not something to be equated with some notion of an ego that we should transcend, but a fundamental notion: it is the work of sentient beings, the biological equilibrium they permanently seek (homeostasis, which can be restrained or generalized). The finality (in a cybernetic sense) of which is no less than the maintenance of our being, and that is true of all living things.
What we have been, up to now, aside from this bundle of biological needs to be met, is this hodgepodge of sociocultural automatisms, of which are the value judgments (prejudices) that serve the sole purpose to maintain the hierarchical structures that make up our societies. The principles of productivism, of contribution, of work-for-the-sake-of-X are imprinted from an early age and never doubted. Religious dogma persists even when we discard the Gods, and serve the same purpose as them. The vacuum is filled by all sorts of Manichean (Good vs. Evil) systems of thought, or the worship of money and power. One replacement has been the belief in "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"; few seemingly aware that our usage of these loaded words have only ever served the interests of the dominant, or those wishing to become dominant.
Laborit suggested we replace those words with "Knowledge, Conscience, Imagination". The distinguishing characteristics of homo sapiens come from the development of the last evolved part of his brain, the neo-cortex. This development separates us from other animals (as a matter of degrees, not kind), but its repression and redirection towards creation for the sake of profit leads us to our ruin, and that of all other species along with it. With our creative imagination -- the ability to make associations and abstractions, we receive (through language and culture) the ability to understand and create new working hypotheses, models and structures, and operate a mise en forme ("shaping") of our environment. Using technical information, we have transformed our environment in a way other species could not. But socially, we have done little of any worth. Whatever we can say about capitalism, however we wish to critique it, it remains that it was favorable for the development of technical information. Less thermodynamic energy became needed to achieve the same result: we became more efficient. But that technical information now threatens homo sapiens. Why?
Because we have failed to realize a common project, which can only be done through the development and propagation of generalized information. Without generalized information, we fail to think systemically, to see the interdependence--the dynamic structures--that rule us, and to include our social (group/sub-group) structures within its greater whole (every level of organization having its underlying and overlying levels). This despite the fact that we depend on each other's survival since the Neolithic period, which gave rise to specialization, and despite the fact that the same threats now threaten all of our survival: nuclear war, climate change, advances in A.I, the increasing centralization of power, etc.
Still, we don't care about the species; we think close and short-term, because that's how we have been taught to organize our lives, to serve nothing but profit. And because our care for others only extends to the protection of our molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid, or those who will allow us to protect them and those we have thrown into the future. But on the topic of those molecules, which we are so attached to--this immortality project--how much of our genetic code is left after three generations? 12.5%. Not very much. Seven generations? Less than 1%. So much for immortality. We have known about auto-reproduction for a long time, but we have neglected the fundamental concepts of auto-(re)organisation and auto-production.
And even those who do think about such things as "the future of our species", once they bring it up (in an ideological setting), they are rarely doing something else than expressing the content of their unconscious to serve their own ends, not the species'. But if we can speak of goals, of finality (teleonomy) then we have to come to the realization that the goal is to align both: that our self-gratifying actions also serve our societies, that our societies serve nations, that nations come together to serve our species and planet which we all rely upon to exist -- all of which retroacts (feeds-back) on the individual (as it always has). We cannot separate ourselves from this multi-level loop. Currently, this is a positive feedback loop, it increases entropy, amplifies disorder, due to its having allocated work for the wrong finality (profit rather than survival) which will lead to the collapse of not only this system, but possibly all of Earth's systems.
We were never educated to be humans who understand ourselves and who could be able to cooperate to prevent this; we were never taught how to make use of our creative imagination. And to come full circle, productivist/informational societies only encourage the propagation of specialized, professional information, not generalized information. That is why we cannot rely on "being connected". The information most of us receive most of the time is noise. It's a distraction for a product or you are the product as your attention is captivated for profit. Or, often, it's what helps in the immediate, at the cost of the future, because we have been pushed to our limits and that is all we can seem to pay attention to now if we want to just survive and not be too depressed and unable to get out of bed in the morning.
What can be done? Well, ironically, a lot can be done by doing less. You free yourself by fleeing from hierarchical structures of dominance, as much as possible. Find your pleasure elsewhere, through the imagination; or fight the excesses of power locally, or by creating decentralized networks that work internationally where generalized information can be shared, while it is still possible. You have to work, you have to go against the stream in order to understand things. But don't imagine that things will change until the masses have received the generalized information that they need in order to be aware of what they are, of the functioning of their nervous system, which so far has almost always only served to maintain hierarchical structures of dominance. More and more people will seek it out with the advent of climate change and its various crises. But it might be too late already, we may have been distracted for too long.
To my pessimistic and fatalistic friends, I quote the biologist Jean Rostand: "All hopes are permitted to Man, including the hope to disappear."
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