(preamble) The big Story that we
presently tell ourselves about
ourselves is largely a product of modernity: the U.S.A. Story and the rest of
the developed world. They are
closely related, but not the same as we are seeing more and more everyday as
the “U.S. government” displays its arrogance and distain for other nations, as
well as its own people.
But, it is too easy, to say ‘US
Government’! What is meant is the power centers vying for control of both
specific regions of power and, ultimately, power over as much as is possible
with the present technological and economic designs. These power centers are not always obvious – see essay: A Creeping Encroachment. The first rule is to not be recognized as arrogating
power until it is a fait accompli.
At present all those jockeying for power are blaming ‘the government’
for its failures, by which they mean the others vying for power, failures that
they claim they will correct. Of
the various factions some are business/corporate in origin, some are more
ideologically based and some are more purely political – power for power’s sake
– but almost none are what they present themselves to be to the public.
None are the US Government per se; that responsibility is
still Constitutionally with The People even as they have effectively been
removed from power through economic marginalization– and in part as a result of
a long and torturous process of giving up. Ultimately, however, the final
consequence of the following argument is that the power still resides in The
People and they will implement that power in whatever form they perceive it.
I wrote in another essay: unless the Story is changed, the play stays the
same with only a change in the players. But changing the players is so much
easier; we hope they will deliver the lines in some new and evocative way –
though they never do. Without a
different Story presented as a different play, the lines and the outcomes
remain the same.
A different play! Now there’s the
rub. What is to be the plot? What will be asked of the actors? Will the present company be able to do
it well? Do it at all? The present players will demand good roles! Perhaps it
is better to stay with the same old play and just let the theater close when it
has gone stale.
All the present efforts seem to be to
create a “new” play that is still the same old play with new characters; many
of the same actors in different makeup, the same plot, the same situations, the
same dramatic moments, the same jokes, the same meanings, the same messages…
all the old and reliable niches for all the old and reliable people doing all
the old and reliable things.
Before a new Story can be told it is
vital that we actually know the details of the present Story; some parts need
to kept, though perhaps changed in their relations to other parts. Other parts
discovered, rediscovered, created from whole cloth or through wild serendipity
added to the play. We must know
the old play completely to be successful, but a major theme of the old play is
that it not be examined critically:
such examination is described in the present play as sacrilegious, unpatriotic,
mean spirited, intellectually elitist and deeply suspicious: all such efforts
have been accused of attempting to destroy “our way of life.” --- And, of
course, that is true.
* * *
What is the present Story and how does it
work? What are the major themes,
plots and subplots of the play?
First and foremost we must be prepared for a very complicated,
convoluted, contradictory and cryptic interweaving of elements, putting the
most complex 19th century Russian novel to shame.
It is both tempting and commonplace to
believe that there is some pervasive pattern of order in the organization of
human idea – some pattern that has origins other than in random variations
settling into arrangements that are the least fragile – but commonplace or
tempting as it can be, such a belief (or hope) is false. Human stories are like the perceptual
phenomena of filling in the gaps.
Story is bits and pieces that can be
strung together into linear narratives, but Story, as we must understand it, is
non-linear – many parts can be combined in many ways – if the elements are seen
as coming from the general story (valid parts of Story), they can be
contradictory without dissonance.
Just as we fill in the gaps in an image or visual sequence, we fill in
the gaps between and around story elements and believe that the gaps were never
there [1].
The swirl of events draws up various
elements of Story as cognitive mapping needed to explain or guide potential
responses, blending the biological, the learned and the imagined into a tangle
that it is our habit to rationalize into a coherent narrative. Story, as it
functions in daily life, becomes a trove of interrelated anecdotes ranging from
official narratives that “everyone” is expected to give, at least, lip service
to, to stories that define one’s family, kinships (of all sorts) and habits.
I am thinking of Story as largely unarticulated
foundational idea – unarticulated and perhaps unarticulable in the normal
course of the consideration of our thought. A good model of Story might be as an interface for ideation
in language laid on a biological armature.
Untangling the various elements of Story
is more taunting than explicating the human genome. The genome, for all its variations is structured on an
understandable framework and functions within understandable boundaries. Story doesn’t exist in a fixed place
with fixed relationships and yet it is still the underlying informational
structure for human action. What
follows is a monumental presumption – the attempt to clarify some of the major
themes and plots of, especially, the U.S. American Story.
* * *
Big themes of the US American Story:
(1) Belief in the human right and
responsibility to dominate the earth
(without any consideration of any need to integrate actions into the
material and energy economies of natural cycles). This belief, combined with #4, takes on the special form of ‘American
Exceptionalism’
(2) Belief that human life is specially
anointed by a non-material superior entity who created the universe and then
created humans as its material representative. (another, less institutional,
form of this belief is that humans are the culmination of the evolutionary
process – what evolution was proceeding toward from the beginning.)
(3) Belief in agency (human agency and supernatural agency)
rather than events being moved by the immediate and direct action of preceding
events and the statistical properties of randomness.
(4) Acting on a “natural” hierarchy based
on how much a living thing is like one’s self and one’s community: some humans
are more “human”, more worthwhile, than others. Some can be considered as having the same worth as animals,
and animals are valued (and feared) in relation to how much they display
human-like appearance and behavior.
(5) The human leader principle: another,
more CSO based, system of valuing (while still tied to primate group dynamic
principles) is based on accumulations of power-related objects and behaviors:
defined in the US American society as wealth and charisma. Ultimately, this has
to do with the biology of leadership and its adaptation from primate social
evolution into human communities. (Charisma is interesting in this context,
not a mystical quality, but the product of display of confidence and the
ability to rapidly read others and appear to be like them – a specialized form
of imitation, magnified in effect by attractiveness. Confidence without
empathic connection is considered boorish, empathic connection without
confidence is considered weakness and attractiveness without the other two is
considered frivolous.)
(6) The accumulation of material
possessions is the measure of worth and value: wealth and power trump all other
human achievements justifying much that would be called sin or crime without
the actual attainment of wealth.
(7) The belief that humans are individual self-reliant units of action: each person is seen as a
fully independent actor making from the world’s opportunities what they can
(moved properly by acquisitiveness).
Success and failure are equally earned only by the amount and quality of
effort. Circular reasoning is
generally applied: success (by the standards of #4 and 6) equals effort;
failure equals sloth.
* * *
The next essay will look at these big
themes in more detail and begin to offer suggestions as to what another Story
might be. The third essay in this
series will attempt to see the present Story and alternative Stories in both
real political and biophysical terms.
[1] Dawkins’ and Blackmore’s concept of
‘meme’ is closely related to these ideas, but is too tied to the analogy with
biological genes. Genes interact complexly,
as do Story elements, but new genes are not created out of nothing to fill in
gaps that didn’t even exist previously before they were juxtaposed. My concept
is that an information handling system, new to the universe that I call the
Consciousness System of Order (CSO), has formed with the human nervous system
as its primary substrate (for now).
Information is handled in completely new ways that result in new and
previously “impossible” probability structures for what might exist. And even though the CSO resides
primarily in the human nervous system, we are not even remotely ‘in charge’ of
it.
New Oxford American Dictionary (Apple
computer): Meme: “an
element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed
from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation.”
Webster’s New World College Dictionary: “Meme: A unit of cultural
information as a concept, belief or practice, that spreads from person to
person in a way analogous to the transmission of genes.”
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