I was listening to a physicist explaining that in nature the “individuals” participating in a thermodynamic system self-organise in such a way to eliminate any perturbation as soon as possible. If you put a rock in a river you force the deflected molecules to run into the incoming ones, resulting in a sort of congested intersection, a turbulence of unfathomable complexity. But very quickly the molecules give way to order, and they generate the whirlpool where their collective movement harmonizes so as to maximise flow speed (river whirlpools appear to circle water in place, but in reality they suck up turbulence and allow for laminar flows to happen once again down stream).
However, at the intersection of humans we have a very different thing happening. In our case the disturbances tend to self-sustain, or inflame. The difference is given by the sole fact that molecules don’t have an “ego” to make them behave stupidly by adding further feed-back loops comprising biases & retributive action.
We think that our egos help us but i’m certain that future civilizations will look at us and say:
“Wow.. how much time, energy and other resources were those primitives wasting in the immense amount of grinding that took place at every level of their interaction, individuals, race groups, religions, firms, states...”
At this macro level of social interaction Nature hasn’t yet modulated its patterns (i.e. humans, and primarily their psychological structure called ego) so that they could interact with a sufficient degree of fluency — which would be desirable due to its beneficial returns for each individual.
There was a point though where these patterns acquired the ability of being self-aware in the world, thus giving rise to “moral life”, “conscious expertise” & “responsibility”. A point past which they should’ve been able to self-adjust, and not simply wait passively to be shaped by their outside environment.
How you parse the problem is a matter of which kind of “enlightenment” you pertain to — the eastern naturalistic type (where the origin of human actions is seen as residing well outside the human, distributed somewhere within the undefinable Dao, which is guilty of everything as it were), or the western humanist type (where the human is above the natural world, having freedom to reason, making him responsible for his actions). My personal understanding is that both traditions are living traditions, and they are destined to shape and morph within the minds of their beholders, honing towards a common general direction that’s likely in between the two.
Irrespective of your view, taoist or libertarian, if you consider the wealth of knowledge we’ve acquired by now, there is a huge conundrum:
What are the forces opposing psychological evolution & ego-transcendence, and consequently humanity’s harmonious flow? How much of our failure to transcend is coming from a general human ignorance & how much of it comes from an elite human expertise? How much of our failure to coordinate comes from highly knowledgeable entities constantly manipulating people, creating artificial currents through them so they could surf upon, carving them up in antagonistic groups so they can lead their fights through them? How would civilization look if those manifesting the dark triad of machiavellism, narcissism & psychopathy wouldn’t be favored to climb the power hierarchy?
Image: Anish Kapoor ‘Descension’
