“…qualitatively there is no discernible difference in content between a culture and a psychosis” __Weston la Barre
Culture, by creating converts or believers in one systematic process, allows each individual to insulate him/her self from the harshness of reality. We gather, in small groups, for security. Two or more together can face reality with greater sense of confidence than one alone.
Slater writes:
“The notion that people begin as separate individuals, who then march out and connect themselves with others, is one of the most dazzling bits of self mystification in the history of the species. Through this mystification we make ourselves vulnerable to manipulation by essentially mechanical forces.”
Seeing ourselves as disconnected individuals united by technological and mechanical means, is to assume that we are originally united by the rules we formulate, and this is not so. Epigenetics has uncovered the realization that we are united by ancient biological forces that drive us toward unity, the need not only to reproduce, but to replicate ourselves as much as possible. The problem is, once cultures grow to a size in which they can ignore both instinct and surrounding environment in favor of “internal circuitry, or internal logic, to quote from Slater, “A connection is broken, a balance wheel lost, and the system becomes capable of exponential growth, of robot-like movement, of running amuk”.
That, essentially, is the condition described in the “Tower of Babel” account (Genesis 11). The realization that the people would begin operating by their own internal “circuitry” and logic was made apparent in verse 6: “….and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do”.
In referring to Weston La Barre, Slater writes:
“There is no natural selection among ideas and beliefs. Millions can believe the same falsehood for thousands of years.”
That which survives, survives. This works for evolution, because evolution assumes we are embedded in a larger environmental system that causes us to react to feedback from our environment. But once a culture begins to respond to its own internal circuitry, to its own internal logic, it may expand exponentially in total disregard of the surrounding environment, or other people who may thrive in that environment. It becomes growth for growth’s sake. “Nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do”.
This, of course, takes me back to my earlier essay regarding the “gray goo” of nanotechnology, and the process by which we may stop ourselves from going too far. If we start accepting things because “all those people can’t be wrong”, we’ve already gone wrong in our thinking. The balance wheel is broken, and the system can run amuk. As Slater points out:
“…we begin to seek our coherence from the conceptual system rather than from reality itself and our embeddedness in it”.
Viewed in this fashion, the warning against ‘false Gods” is not about choosing among conceptual realities, but learning to adjust and organize ourselves according to a process of feedback that keeps us grounded in reality, or “nature’s God” to refer to Jefferson’s statement as well as Blackstone’s reference to “God, nature, and reason” as the foundation for law.
Slater has seen and written of this process as well:
“When organic(instinctual or natural) response is deadened, the readiness to react to external messages still remains. In the absence of the original channel, others will be used. Authoritarian submission is one such channel, with symbolic authorities(traffic lights, signs, written instructions) being increasingly substituted for personal ones as the anesthesia progresses. Another channel is ideology: that is, a general instruction which has been internalized and from which specific rules for behavior and attitude can be logically deduced”.
As you see, this ties in to earlier essays regarding the “numbing” of numbers, and the introduction of the alphabet as a linear form of communication(more on that later). We are “deadened’ to instinctual and individual responses in favor of external messages offered by the culture. As you can see, religion can easily develop from this process, but not just one religion. Many religions can spring from collective forms in which people choose cultural messages over instinctual messages. Since there is no natural selection among ideas and beliefs, there is no “off switch” until and unless the culture simply dies from its own overextended growth(overspecialization) in which the culture or species reaches a “bottleneck” in which it can no longer adapt. Rather than speciate into smaller groups, a human culture will seek to adjust its failing conceptual system and more desperately seek answers from a system that has failed due to its overspecialization. It accelerates its destruction by trying to do the same thing, only with greater intensity, as we see in our banking system today.
Slater writes:
“Humans deprived of community can become, in a sense, ‘imprinted’ on rules, machines, ideologies, and bureaucratic structures.”
Our banking system has become one in which it focuses on its internal “circuitry” and issues “money” on its own bureaucratic decision-making process. it can only eventually fail.
