Being Part of Something Big

This is one of the most powerful of our human obsessions. It probably showed up about the time we became civilized. Before that, we were content to live in small societies, and felt no need for something bigger.

The coming of civilization has never been studied very thoroughly, as far as I know. Perhaps one reason for this avoidance was the deeply embedded insanity that became part of our collective personality. An insanity that has only gotten worse as we became more advanced.

Living in Latin America, I can see this difference plainly. They feel no need to improve themselves, because their society is good enough already – and always has been, as far as they can see.

I can also see that America is moving in this direction also: the way things are is good enough and any attempt to improve them makes them uncomfortable.

In either case, the people are part of something bigger – a society that is changing or not changing.

What interests me now is when we became obsessed with being part of something really big - the beginning of the Modern World. This is another subject that has not been studied very well: what on earth got into us? Perhaps it was the idea of unlimited growth - a preposterous idea, but one still very much in fashion.

What actually happened was truly amazing: as unlimited growth became impossible, most of our lives became unconscious - and lost touch with reality! To put this another way: we became unaware.

2012
05/25
CATEGORY
History
Negative being
Philosophy
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Going Negative

NY Times – Opinionator

I could hardly believe my eyes, but this is what David Brooks said:
—
The thing that actually surprises me most is a shift in morals. Of course politicians have always lied. But now dishonesty is seen as a sign you are playing the game the way it should be played. A few months ago Romney ran an ad that took some Obama comments about the economy completely out of context. It was blatantly dishonest, but it was meant to show the world how tough Romney was.

Similarly, Obama’s ad about Romney’s Bain experience makes two claims. First, that the steel company GST was successful until Bain acquired it. That is blatantly false. Second, that Romney dumped people on the street and cut them off when the company shut down. That too is blatantly false. Romney had left Bain by that point.

Blatant falsity is now seen as a sign that you are a true professional.

2012
05/24
CATEGORY
Morality
Political comment
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Meliorism

I am reading Classical American Philosophy, and in the Introduction, on page 9, it discusses Meliorism. William James states:

The melioristic universe universe is conceived of after a social analogy, as a pluralism of independent powers. It will succeed just in proportion as more of these work for its success. If none work, it will fail. If each does it best, it will not fail. Its destiny thus hangs on an if, or on a lot of ifs – which amounts to saying…that, the world is as yet unfinished, it total character can be expressed only by hypothetical and not by categorical propositions.

This meliorism is clearly evident in Dewey’s writings: he is concerned ultimately and in detail with liberating and extending the religious and aesthetic dimensions of experience, with securing effective individuality and community in social life, and with restructuring human relations and institutions so as to foster lifelong growth and education.

It finishes with this, on page 11 – Let Santayana have the last word:

All traditions have been founded on practice: in practice the most ideal of them regain their authority, when practice really deals with reality, and faces the world squarely, in the interests of the whole soul. To bring the whole soul to expression is what all civilization is after. We must be patient, for the task is long; but the fields are always white for the harvest, and the yield cannot be insignificant when laborers go forth into the harvest with the high and diligent spirit which we divine in you.

2012
05/24
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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The Mass

I am a firm believer that historical events must be considered as complexes of events.

Newtonian Physics accustomed us to thinking in simple terms of cause and effect – and this became a religious obsession. It takes no genius to see that the world is not so simple – but whenever I write about this, I get comments proclaiming the contrary, at great length. The world is basically simple (in moral terms), they say.

As I have said before, mass production produced mass man. I now want to elaborate on that.

The Greeks had a factory system, using slaves, to produce the Amphora (dated to around 4800 BCE) used to transport liquid commodities in the Mediterranean. But this technology did not take off until much later, about the time of the Industrial Revolution.

By then it had become a complex, consisting of the following:

  • The Sailing Ship, that made world-wide trading possible. This in turn supported many industries for building, maintaining, and most importantly – manning them. The ships were mass-produced according to standard patterns and the sailors were mass-produced also. Their families did not live well, they barely subsisted – but that was enough for them to reproduce and create a population boom of ignorant people.
  • Banking, providing the capital for many of these trading ventures. This is where capitalism got its start.
  • Joint-stock companies, which also provided capital, but in a form (stocks) anyone could invest in. This made fraud hard to resist.
  • Mass markets, where commodities could be traded (and speculated in). This allowed everyone to know the price of anything. This also applied to slaves – and to the labor market (for sailors, for example), where people became commodities.

The effect on people was the most important, and had side-effects no one anticipated. People were no longer interested in the common good, or in virtue – but only in quick money they could spend on luxury consumer goods.

They became labeled, in the 1930s: mass man - and this is what made Fascism possible. And added one more bullet-item:

  • Mass media

The revolution that produced television and then the computer/software/internet/wireless (a complex in it itself) has produced a new breed of man we cannot understand, and may never understand – because they are against understanding, and everything else too.

A state I call negative being.

2012
05/24
CATEGORY
Negative being
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Be In The World, But Not Of It

I never thought my religious background, which was the curse of my young life, would ever do me any good – but all of a sudden it has come to my rescue.

My family belonged to a small religion, more like a sect really, and one thing they hated was worldliness. The world was evil, and they wanted to have nothing to do with it. But they had a problem: how to live in the world without  being polluted by it. And even more than that: how to live perfect lives so they could convert the world to their religion – and thereby save it from its sins.

This must sound insane to you, and it is. But it is a dominant strand of Protestantism – and in an eerie way, much of Islam too. The urge to purify the world – and make it like us.

Having grown up with these people, I can testify that they are not good, once you look below their self-righteous surface.

My religious background made me totally unsuited for the world of business, which was not interested in righteousness at all – it was not even interested in any kind of goodness. This was not the fault of business, which can be used to do great good, but the fault of contemporary society – which I have described as being in a state of negative being - whose dominant trait is destructiveness, while being completely unaware.

As a result, as an adult I am in much the same social condition as I was in as a child. I am in a world I intensely disapprove of – and who intensely disapproves of me. Not a good situation to be in.

Having said that, the practical problem is how to cope with it. Or how to be in the world without being of it.

Right now I have no idea. This situation is unlike any other the human race has been faced with. We have dealt ourselves a bad deck of cards from which there does not appear to be an escape.

I am not asking for advice, I only want to tell other people where I am.

2012
05/24
CATEGORY
Negative being
Philosophy
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We Have Put Too Much of Ourselves Into Our Machines

As result, there is little of us left.

This is something thinkers of all kinds have overlooked. Perhaps because they thought of technology and people as two different things – when they are only one. Perhaps because technical change was so slow for so long.

But about 500 years ago a technological and social speedup resulted in what we call the Modern World. This was an extremely complicated development which peaked out in the 18th and 19thCenturies – and then collapsed.

The most important result of this was a new kind of people and a new orientation towards the world – negative beings (sometimes referred to as mass man) and negative being. People started destroying themselves and their world. They were unaware of this – and indeed, unaware of anything.

We became so infatuated with our new machine-selves we thought we were divine – and by definition, could not die. When we were already pretty much dead.

2012
05/23
CATEGORY
History
Technology
Psychology
Philosophy
Sociology
Negative being
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The Common Good

I am learning about the Revolution of 1800, as I am listening to Empire of Liberty. I find this history as interesting as any novel, and I keep wondering why more Americans aren’t interested.

This election marked a fundamental shift in the way Americans thought about themselves – basically they stopped thinking and started acting like everyone else. And they stopped being interested in the common good as they had during the Revolution, and started being interested only in themselves.

Some deep philosophical issues were involved here, which still have not been resolved. But something else was happening: people were changing too.

And this is what Americans do not want to know: they were changing for the worse. They were no longer interested in the common good, and did not think such a thing ever existed, or could exist.

2012
05/22
CATEGORY
Early American
History
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Sordor

From Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:

Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): -s
Etymology: New Latin, from Latin sordes dirt, filth + -or – more atSWART
: REFUSE, DREGS; also : SORDIDNESS

I can across this word reading Lewis Mumford’s The Condition of Man, which I have spoken of frequently before, on page  301:

For those who found it impossible to accept the grinding discipline of the new factory or the sordor of the new environment…To labor unflaggingly from morning to night, to multiply the powers and widen the services of the machine, to produce more cottons and hardware, in order to beget more people who would produce more cottons and hardware, were the goals of the utilitarian effort.

This was my father. He hated people, but he loved to work – and ruined his health doing it. Then, just as his business was beginning to succeed, he abandoned it to go on a church mission – which eventually failed also.

Failure for him was success.

2012
05/22
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Business
Philosophy
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The Negative State of Being

This is another posting no one is going to understand. I can just barely understand it myself.

The theory is simple enough: there are positive and negative states of being. Most people probably have a feel for what those are. Unfortunately, this feeling is misleading because it is too superficial.

First of all, being for humans is different than it is for any other beings. This is a big philosophical point, and one they have worked over thoroughly. But their conclusions have not filtered down to the rest of humanity – partly because their thinking was inadequate: they could not conceive of negative being – a very big idea.

Nietzsche represented a breaking point in philosophical thought – literally: he went insane. Everyone agrees he said something important – but no one can agree on what he said.  It is clear, however, that the modern world was ending in his time – and this had a profound effect on him.

I have a simple analysis of people like him – they could not be, no matter how hard they tried. Because their world could not be either. And in frustration it switched from positive being to negative being and started destroying itself.

The next philosopher of being was Heidegger, and he was a Nazi – completely enraptured by negative being. After WWII, he would only comment that Nazism did not live up to its promise! Perhaps it did not destroy the whole world, as it started out to do.

As a citizen of the last half of the 20th Century, I can testify to its destructiveness. Any office in any organization became a killing field. This was something I never got used to, but it seemed natural to everyone else.

I was not the only one to notice this, there were plenty of other people who noticed it and commented on it. But their insights were overcome, one way or the other.

For example, I meet a psychologist working in San Francisco whose specialty was highly-sensitive people. She wrote a book that made her famous, but her publisher refused to include part of her findings – because he said, people wouldn’t like them, and the book would fail.

She never went back and published the part of her findings that people did not like. They were simply forgotten. As I recall, she found that Americans would not support the sensitive people in their midst (about 20 percent of the population). She went on to attract many followers, but they all carefully overlooked this fundamental fact.

Difficulty coping with the working environment must be the most common problem any therapist sees. But in my experience (and I had quite a few of them) they refuse to work on this.

Like everyone else they chant “There is nothing wrong with the world!” When everything is wrong with it.

2012
05/22
CATEGORY
Negative being
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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Being Unemployed

There but for the grace of God, go I

John Bradford, the man this was attributed to, was burned at the stake. In that sense times have improved, but the emotional impact can be almost a great, as these two links show:

NY Times - Control

Not Working – the pulse of the American Depression

I did the sensible thing and simply left the country – but that seems to be an option few other Americans have considered. For me, staying alive was most important, but for most Americans being in America seems to be even more important.

Fortunately, I am different.

2012
05/21
CATEGORY
Economy
Morality
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