“Civilization is Sterilization!”
– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!”
― George Bernard Shaw
Nobody owns anything in our society. We’re all just a really bad day, or month, or year away from losing everything. All we really do is go to sleep hoping that the system that makes your position in your company, or profession, or business, the tiniest bit necessary; is still there when you wake up. You might not know that you’re hoping for this. But in the back of their heads, every animal knows who owns the territory that they inhabit.
We all know what’s necessary to maintain that territory and how to find our place within it. Within the hierarchy. How? You have to look to the leader. He (or she) is the one who tells you where the social rewards and where the predators are. How to spot them. How to hunt. How to gather. How to play. How to practice. How to fuck. He (or she) who holds the keys to the rituals that access these basic biological necessities, controls the masses.
There is a network of control. The one who gives us the biological needs that the network helps us keep in line is the 3-pound gelatinous piece of alien technology floating around in our skulls. The next level is the first tier of leaders, your parents, who have a network of their own. The next is your peer group and their networks. The one who directs all of this is your regional culture. A culture which is formed by all of the living networks. But the foundation, and majority of whatever culture you’re a part of is made up of layers of influence from beyond the grave.
The correlation between morality and sanitary impulses is a great example. The bible’s insights on human nature have always been ahead of their time. But the insight in the phrase “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is scary in its intuitiveness. With various researchers finding that the connected psychological definitions and reactions to both uncleanliness and immorality interplaying and having a bigger role in our daily lives than we realize. Morality being more of a guttural, snap decision than previously believed. Along with instincts like wanting to clean ourselves after experiencing or recounting a shameful act. Or having harsher moral judgements when being uncomfortable or bothered by a bad smell, are examples of how our lesser attributed sensory drives overpower and/or influence the others and as a result, direct our supposedly conscious and often perceived as autonomous moral judgements. But it’s also a blueprint for those few of us who find that their place in our society is that of a leader of the masses or mass manipulator.
Those who live morally are clean and it’s your job to live morally. And how do you live morally? Through the rules in our books. Rules handed down by God himself. The majority of which subtly deal with either staying physically healthy through dietary and hygienic laws or spiritually healthy through “cleansing” the heart, or mind, or spirit, or soul, etc. Verses like, “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit”; “wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds”; and “by the washing with water through the word…”, pepper the entirety of the bible to make cleanliness and morality almost synonymous. A brilliant way of conditioning the mind. The benefits of cleanliness and healthy living are universal. You connect God’s authority to something universally beneficial; God becomes universally beneficial. And as most of you can imagine, a daily beneficial practice, like eating, or sleeping, or breathing, becomes a foundational aspect of our reality.
In the last part of this series, we covered what strategies a tribal leader might employ to communicate an abstract idea or influence others while handicapped with a primitive language. Mainly, they connected their directives to people’s biological necessity for food, specifically by theologizing the preparations for seasonal changes. I believe this was especially helpful for helping children prioritize these dates. We marked them with celebrations knowing that our libidinous forces (forces of love) would provide the best basis to program the dates.
Sometime between 21,000 and 24,000 years ago, we built a wall. It wasn’t a monument. And it wasn’t built on some holy site. The second oldest human built structure ever found is a wall at the mouth of a cave near the small town of Kalabaka in Thessaly, Greece. (The first is 476,000-year-old wooden structure discovered in Zambia. Though, that was before humans appeared. But I digress.)
The society that built this wall had lived in or around that cave through generations of deadly winters. Struggling to keep fires alive as the demonic wind slithered through the cave. Aside from the impressiveness of this technological leap, it also possibly marks another intuitive achievement of territorial isolation possibly fostering innovation. This type of innovation has its limitations, as we can only innovate so much through necessity alone. Ideas involving things independent of necessities take an outside perspective. Someone oblivious or indifferent to the qualms of the society they’re in.
The wall was made of clay and uncut limestone. Inside the cave is evidence of ceramic experimentation. Their isolation may have resulted in them finding new ways to use the fire that was so critical to their survival. Sitting around forming wet clay into cylindrical shapes, someone probably asked themselves, “what happens if I hold this over the fire?” and did it. Playing with its adhesiveness. But this is during the calm periods. During 60 degree summers. When the snow melted and the lake’s shore was full of wet clay.
We were seasonal animals. Like every other animal, our bodies knew the bad times were coming. Better attuned to a stable climate. We make the mistake of believing that it’s our consciousness and its perception of time that makes us aware of the changing seasons. It’s the sensory system. Absorbing up millions of God-knows-what in the atmosphere as we pick up a peppermint mocha at the Starbucks drive-thru, on a 60-degree, February afternoon in the pacific northwest.
Around 40,000 years ago, humans on the island of Tasmania were using fire to alter their landscapes by burning down forests. This turned dense vegetation into open grassland. This practice somehow spread throughout Northern Africa and Europe. Whether there were roaming tribes that transferred information between those that practiced sedentism, or they came by the practice independently, this was an exercise that also demanded seasonal awareness and would enforce our cyclical nature. A pattern of existence built around a certain time of the year that we can prepare for.
During the Last Glacial Maximum, near the Meteora mountains back in Thessaly, the winters were the manifestation of death itself. With all the tragedy and gore of the worst and most recent accounts of any town going through a winter without electronic heaters or access to conventional tools for cutting wood or lighting a fire. The cyclical trauma precipitated a need, and the periods of rest fostered a creativity. This was our nature and connected us through the generations of our bloodline’s existence. To all living things in our surroundings. Creation and destruction. With the binary system of the seasons came the binary system of morality. Not wrong versus right; Good versus evil. A simple way to teach others how important preparation for this upcoming time. It’s an evil spirit. A being intent on punishing your laziness.
We connected mythos of characters with an authoritarian nature. Probably because of how imperative the preparation for these seasonal events were. Making the information absolutely necessary to heed under threat of divine consequences.
By now most with even a passing interest in religious studies is scoffing and pulling their hair out in a rage. Yes, religious dates have always been adoptions and adaptations of ancient seasonal markers, but it’s more complex than that, blah, blah, blah. IDGAF! Giving consistency to ritualized celebrations made sure that these cyclical practices already came preloaded through the new members of the society going through the programming involuntarily through these ritualized celebrations.
The forces that inspired these celebrations became a foundational part of the individual’s reality. What was real was so only through the authority of the religion. Pretty soon the health of the mind, the body, and social relationships, all come from the recognition of, and participation in, the religion. An important individual’s, an institutional, and religious ceremonies, even if not celebrated, were known by everyone in the region. They grounded you to a community and a government. To a time and a place. And the community and the government you lived under was only possible through the authority and blessing of your God.
Somewhere along the line, intellectual development through the long-distance communication of printing, along with the new industrialized rhythm of life, we transitioned to a new psychological state that society lived in for three centuries. In which we continued atomizing time, now through giving up parts of our day to newspapers and the radio, and then television.
We made the rhythm, built and fine-tuned by those running our society, a foundational structure of every facet of our daily lives. We let it dictate our reality. This has resulted in unintended psychological consequences. We have become schizophrenic en masse through this programming. Operating on a utilitarian civility and oblivious to the inhumanity in our hearts. Through temporal social controls, teaching us that certain times are for certain things, they unified us into a march forward.
And this mentality might have blessed us with our lightspeed travel through all of the developments and collective achievements. But it is why we seem to always be stampeding towards another era of collective violence. This living rhythm, this gargantuan beast that we call society also has emotions. Things will eventually disrupt this rhythm. More and more frequently when social media entered the chat. (I know, I’m sorry.) But the best thing to disrupt this rhythm has been the reintroduction of socialist ideals, also thanks to social media. Because capitalism was awesome until the pigs got greedy. Sometimes the society gets angry, and politicians have to direct or redirect that anger.
Those deemed intelligent enough to manage the system of keeping the rhythm going successfully directed our anger outward for almost a century. Blaming any disturbance on the outsiders while enlisting the young patriots, most of them from poor families, and employing the rest to reenforce the beat. With every generation we continued to march blindly to their rhythm. And every generation of manager since the days of ancient Mesopotamia has tried to reach the limit to the power this rhythm gives them. Pharaohs have built pyramids. Presidents have put people on the moon. It pushed the colonists out west and ensured their victory over the natives. Helped the Spanish decimate the Mesoamerican’s culture.
It starts as infants, seeing our parents rush to be places. Then we begin schooling and a staff of college educated idealists, contending with government mandates, help you to (at the very least) learn how to report to someone on time, to coexist with others, and do tasks that an authority figure, who is not a parent, demands. Did you go to church on the weekends? Then you got a double dose of that. Sports? Army? Then you can add muscular bonding to the mix. The subconscious bonding resulting from the exercises synchronizing your movements along with the natural bonding of a unit. With all of these synchronizing beats in life, you lose sight of the rhythm even more. The benefits of this symphony of social structures that demand pieces of your time is obvious. Social connections, a varying array daily interactions with an objective purpose.
Looking at our interactions from the neurological point of view- gives every interaction such a purpose as the brain is essentially searching for certain stimuli that will result neurochemical rewards. All the while, you do your time in college or work for a living. Consumerism came into our homes using the new technologies of mass communication that individuals had pieced together through the benefit of their society’s proverbial song of progress. Along came the snake of greed investing billions of dollars into psychologists who had peered into pieces of this subconscious human song, mainly those notes of sexual and egocentric vulnerabilities that affect us at various points of our psychological development. Vulnerabilities that they wished to exploit.
Market research had told them at which times in the calendar year your key demographic would best respond to a bombardment of subtextual assaults on you and everyone else around your tv or radio. And it all started with some intuitive individuals who recognized the shift in circumstances every season and formulated a plan. Through generations of individual and group selection tournaments we have reached the reach the ultimate showdown in which ideological, theological, physical, and now economic warfare have chiseled out societal juggernauts that threaten to tear the planet apart.
The problems came when, instead of assuring that this gigantic beat had the economic momentum to keep humming, each generation of rhythm managers got greedier and greedier. Each of them more and more convinced that because we had become blind to more and more hands in the cookie jar as the rhythm, they reinforced, became weaker, thanks to the internet and then social media showing us the inequality we lived under. Delivering unsanctioned messages and possibly foreign propaganda straight into our homes. Messages that commercial media would have never relayed to us. Smartphones then shattered our conception of time. Created an environment in which in which things are more instant, the lows of bad news or something horrific and highs of a beautiful moment, purchasing a shiny new product or achieving sexual gratification can follow each other without delay.
It seems that, just how every medium was able to deliver messages faster, it rushed us through the phases of societal development, experiencing the rise and fall of the empire, with hundreds of millions of eyes analyzing and learning. Noting those who enabled, those who fought, those who spectated. What form and how devastating the fall is, is yet to be seen. But we will learn, because we atomized time, a postmortem to the molecular level will be able to trace back in our archives the exact events that affected the population towards the psychological shifts we’re going through as a society. Through the surveillance files of the Patriot Act and AI this is entirely possible (and probably happening as we speak). The AI would simply search everyone’s conversations (text and calls), plus their viewing, reading, and social media habits, and pinpoint the exact moments the seed of “radical leftism” or “the radical right” germinated and began to split most of the population.
At the end of the day, this is just an overly generalized view on society to introduce my theory that the imitative learning to fear and abide by governmental and theological temporal structures primes you to know who your daddy is. To criticize the ignorance or naivety of any or all of these essays, or just to go around the old idea carousel, hit me up.
In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about the brain and consciousness, I know it, should be great. Thank you for reading.
The Beautiful Panic.com 