Nobody But Yourself (Take Two)

wolf cub 2
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being
can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting.

– ee cummings

My article on Monday, Nobody But Yourself, was one of the worst articles I’ve ever written, not only because, in cluttering it with tangential arguments, I failed to articulate the point I was trying to make, but because, in the process, I made two outrageously dumb statements* that totally undermined my credibility. So rather than trying to clean up that mess, I’m going to start again from scratch, because this is important.
 .     .     .     .     .
Humans are, and always have been, inherently social creatures. This is evolutionary, but it isn’t all about survival. It’s about surviving being worth it. Social behaviour is about joy, about learning, about the value of shared experience. Those things make you want to survive. And if you want to, you will. So Darwin has a hand in this, but mostly indirectly.

Because we are social, we enter into tacit social contracts with others. These contracts entail giving something and getting something, mostly in a win-win proposition (or one party wouldn’t agree to the contract). What we get are some pretty important things:

  • appreciation/love (for who we are and what we do)
  • attention
  • understanding (a mutual reward)
  • desired actions from others
  • the ‘1+1=3’ benefits of collaborative action (accomplishing things no one can do alone)

In evolutionary terms these advantages have evolved into needs: We can no longer live without them, because they are now part of what defines us as a species, so that those who lack them tend to select themselves out of the gene pool. We have developed an insatiable appetite for these things, and we have invented tools that allow us to get more of them.

The most notable of these is language, which we evolved to allow us to be more precise in giving instruction and in communicating what we mean (and perhaps what we feel, though that’s debatable). As a consequence of these inventions, and practice at using them, what has emerged is shared patterns of behaviour and activities, what we call culture. And because culture is social ‘software‘, it can evolve much more quickly than the hard-wired ‘hardware‘ parts of what makes us us ñ our bodies, our emotions and our instincts. And because they can evolve much more quickly, when it suits their purpose, they do.

So we now live in a world where we are trying to employ 21st century social software while we remain trapped in bodies that are largely prehistoric ñ they evolve very slowly, and haven’t changed much in tens of thousands of years. One obvious consequence of this is the physical and emotional illness that comes from our visceral reaction to stress: What used to be an evolutionary advantage (the ability to move very fast and strike very hard when you’re about to be eaten by something bigger than you) has become an evolutionary handicap, a worse-than-useless vestige of our prehistoric past.

I mentioned above what we get from the social contract. Other than the risk of losing our physical and emotional health due to stress, what do we risk or give up in this bargain? Cummings would argue, I think, that unless we are extraordinarily diligent and extremely self-aware and self-competent, we give up everything that make us us ñ we give up being nobody-but-ourselves and we become everybody else.

Think about the nature of the social interactions you enter into every day:

  • At work, you tie yourself in knots to be appreciated and understood, from dressing like everybody else to very gradually shifting your whole worldview to one that is more compatible with, and easier to communicate with, the worldview of everybody else.
  • In your political thinking, you align yourself with the group that comes closer/closest to your own worldview, and you end up defending that party’s worldview, often fiercely, despite not agreeing with or not understanding much of it, because the alternative of the other party’s worldview is even worse: “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”.
  • In your family life, you may contort yourself to earn and be considered worthy of the love of the one person you are allowed to love (alas, in our modern culture, polyamory is not tolerated); you may do anything, including trying to make yourself what you are not, to get or keep that love.
  • In some subcultures, you are expected to sacrifice yourself for some collective ideal, norm or ritual: To marry someone you despise, to self-immolate if your spouse dies, to mutilate yourself to show you ‘belong’.
  • In all your social circles, you’re under enormous pressure to conform to the ‘norms’ of many different peer groups: if you don’t, you risk being bullied in the schoolyard, excommunicated, shunned by your neighbours, and gossiped about behind your back: Just try and get attention and appreciation then.

Dave Snowden quotes Terry Eagleton as saying “you can only defeat an antagonist whose ways of seeing things you can make sense of”. I think the corollary is equally true: there is no point trying to persuade others unless they understand your frame or worldview. The need to make this constant, convulsive accommodation to achieve any kind of mutual understanding places enormous pressure on us to think more and more like everybody else. And the more we think and act like everybody else, the more we become everybody else. Suppress or deny your feelings, conform, do what you’re told, choose Brand A or Brand B (no other brand, and no opting out), look like everyone else, dress like everyone else, talk like everyone else, read and watch and talk about what everyone else reads and watches and talks about.

There have been some remarkable studies of ‘wild’ children, those who have grown up without human social contact. They are generally considered to be mentally and socially ‘retarded’, but they appear to have amazing perceptual and intuitive abilities, and their brains’ neural patterns, not forged by constant exposure to monolithic language, are astonishingly different from ‘civilized’ people’s. They are nobody but themselves.

Perhaps for the first few hours of our lives, we are all nobody but ourselves. After that, I’m not sure our species has ever been anything except everybody else. My anthropological studies would suggest that, at an astonishing pace over the past 30,000 years of civilization culture, we have become less diverse and more homogeneous, in both our thinking and behaviour, and that at an accelerating rate we are becoming more and more everybody else. Indigenous peoples are modestly less monolithic and more tolerant of personal differences of thought and action than civilized people, but they are more like us and everybody else than they are nobody but themselves.

Cummings’ point, and mine, is that it is extremely difficult to be nobody but yourself, but that it is worth it, that we have paid far too high a price for the social contract we have struck, that our poor bodies and emotions and instincts are suffering for it, and that it’s getting worse.

My novel-in-progress The Only Life We Know is about this, and it portrays a world after civilization’s collapse in which every child born is again free to be nobody but themselves, for their lifetime. Perhaps fiction will convey this idea, and its importance, in a more compelling and articulate way than I can in an essay. I just know there is something missing, something lost, something we have given up in civilization’s social bargain, something that we instinctively long for, something worth fighting the hardest battle that any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

That’s what I was trying to say on Monday.

* My first ridiculously dumb statement in Monday’s post was that I don’t really care what readers think of my writing or ideas. The second was that, given the choice between a dialogue on something I’ve written and writing something new, there is no contest. A dialogue in a medium that allows for effective communication between articulate people who have substantial shared context and understanding of each other’s worldview is about as close to intellectual and emotional nirvana as it gets. You’d have to be seriously antisocial toprefer solitary writing to that.

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25 Responses to Nobody But Yourself (Take Two)

  1. Doug Alder says:

    Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human beingcan be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself

    I take very strong objection to cumnming’s claim. True, no one else can feel what you feel, language exists largely to try and overcome that barrier. However you can certainly teach people what to feel. Feelings are a mixture of genetics/instinct and socialization. You can desensitize people to any stimuli that provokes a feeling then install a different feeling – feeling not thought – gut level reaction. It is not instinctive to get squeamish or boil up with rage at the sight of, say, two men making love, but many do having been taught from birth that is the correct response – religion is good at inculcating those kinds of feelings in people.

  2. Bharat says:

    I would add one more important reason to have social contracts — order.How can we have societal order without some form of social contracts / laws ? So, to preserve social order, society as a whole choses to abide by and large to social laws or “collective wisdom”.Yes, collective wisdom is never “perfect”. There is pain when society as a whole gets stuck in malevolent social/economic orders. But fortunately we have evolved to a point where we have institutions to take collective opinion regularly and change order if a need is felt by majority. That is the reason we have social movements time and again. Yes, this process is messy and slow. But, what is the alternative. Chaos ? I don’t see how one can assume that if everyone is left for “nobody-but-yourself”, the society can suddenly become perfect. So, there is bargain here as you said. and, society has chosen the path of following collective wisdom, instead of assuming that people when left to their insticts whill somehow chose wisely.Now, iam not sure if humans are the only species with social contracts. I suspect every species has some form of social contracts. Where we humans have an advantage is we have communication to reason things out. And by and large the world now has institutions through which majority opinion can get reflected in policies. I consider this as an advantage not a disadvantage.Now, let us take take a case study where we feel society is heading in the wrong direction. Environmental issue. Is it because of group-think ? Is social contract forcing us collectively to destroy the biosphere ? To a certain extent, as far as you are stuck in the system for the short term, like needing to drive a car in the western countries, Yes. But, if you take a longer term view, beyond just ONE election cycle, the major reason for collective-wisdom failure is not excess social contract but a misuse of freedom ! Let us take the US. Is any social contract forcing people not from taking a ecologically benign position. NO. There is nothing that prevents 90% of people suddently turning green and voting green party in. But, why is it not happening. Because people CHOOSE not to.Yes, the collective wisdom which votes for a high-growth technocentric society has failed to recognize the ecological importance. But, i don’t see that as an argument against collective wisdom itself. I see it as an argument for the need to change each individuals worldview and if enough people change it, the collective wisdom will change. Again, each individual must think for himself and change. Only when the majority CHOOSE to do so, we will have a paradigm shift in collective-wisdom. In that sense, we arrive at the same point that, what we need is individuals to think. But, i don’t see how social contracts are preventing people from thinking for themselves. In our society, especially in the west, people have complete freedom of thought, freedom to communicate on the internet. But, people are not CHOOSING to think about the larger issues, because most people are stuck in self-delusion, self-absorption, busy 24 hours a day catering to their whims and fancies. So, the solution i see is a moral/spiritual solution that people come out of the SELF and look at the bigger picture. This is why i was defending religion the other day, because practical religion to me means that our little “self” first act in accordance to larger universal laws (including ecological) , seeing it’s overall unity with the universal. This is what true Yoga is about. (Not physical gymnastics that go popularly in west as “yoga”. They are just a minute part of yoga process).To summarize, your argument is that people are somehow constrained by our social structure from thinking freely for themselves. I don’t see social structure as a problem. Infact, i say we have more than enough freedom to think. I see misuse of these freedoms as the problem.

  3. Janene says:

    Hi Dave –I think this one has gone a bit too far. You are leaving the impression that *any* social agreement is too much. But would you ever suggest that wolves need to fight to be nobody-but-themselves? Or dolphins or chimps? We are a social animal and we will always have this dynamic at work. The problem is that we have developed and accepted a social contract that asks too much from us and provides too little in return.Meanwhile, our friend Bharat has fallen back on the old assumption that the problem is people need to be better… may I suggest that the reason people do not choose is because they are incapable of seeing that there is a choice. Because THAT is what our unhealthy system teaches us every day of our lives.Janene

  4. Bharat says:

    Iam sorry if i seem like taking too much of the comment space, but i would like to answer Janene here.Dear Janene:”Unhealthy system” ? Right. Let us people give up RESPONSIBILITIES and blame it on someone else and some abstract “system”. Every system in the world is made up by people. Unless people change, how can systems change ? This seems to me so obvious, i don’t understand why people blame “systems”. Please explain what iam missing here. Is some magic invisible hand imposing the system on us ?”Incapable of seeing that there is a choice”.Please. You mean to say that people are not seeing on the ballot that there are N parties to choose from. Arent’ they making a clear choice there, based on their priorities and worldviews ? I CHOSE in my life to be different, because i SAW what’s going on in the world. I changed my lifestyle and my job. Iam sure many of our readers chose to be different in their life. Have majority of the people in the world become so robotic that all they see is making money ? If so i agree with your statement.

  5. Janene says:

    Bharat –Ok, wait, let’s slow down for a second…I have no interest in giving up responsibility and I agree that the only way things will change is for individual people to choose differently.That being said, your reply is EXACTLY what I was getting at. Choosing a candidate on a ballet is NOT a choice that is going to change anything substantial. Nor is choosing job A or job B. Because all of those choices support maintaining the broken system within which we live. If we are going to see real change in the world, it will be because individual people come to see that bad or worse are NOT the only choices they have. That they can *create* thier *own* choices and THOSE choices will open up opportunities for a healthy, vibrant and resilient future.Janene

  6. Dave Pollard says:

    NOW we’re getting somewhere! My response to Bharat and Janene will come later today, but let’s start with Doug’s comment. He suggests that social conditioning can make us feel squeamish about seeing two men kissing, when we instinctively would not. I think he’s right, but I would argue that when we have been conditioned to think that way, we have become everybody else, and that reaction is not our own true emotion but an artifact of everyone else’s thinking, a vestige of groupthink. When Cummings says “the moment you feel you’re nobody but yourself” I think he’s taking poetic licence and referring only to pure, unadulterated feelings. To pick a more extreme example, a lynch mob (or the authors and supporters of the Patriot Act) certainly have strong feelings of hatred, but I think Cummings would argue they are not natural, they are tainted, not really their personal feelings at all, but everybody else’s. They are mind-less where real emotions are, I think, sensitive, aware, open, childlike. Do you see what I’m getting at? Can anyone else chime in and express this better?

  7. Dave Pollard says:

    Bharat: I think order is a requirement of civilization culture, not of all cultures. Indigenous cultures offer suggestions and ideas, and command mutual respect, but do not mandate order — you are free to make your own decisions (provided they do not hurt or disrespect others’ freedom to do the same).True collective wisdom, I believe, is a sum of parts, a consensus, not a monolithic view or compromise. I didn’t say that if everyone was nobody but themself it would make society perfect. I just said it would make us real, happier, better connected to the world, more natural, more self-sufficient. Would we then be able to refuse to everybody else and live without order (an ideal state of anarchy)? I don’t know, maybe, but I think it would be a worthy experiment.As for choice, I don’t think we really have meaningful choices in our society. And many are (not wilfully) ignorant of what choices they do have. The answer is not to become better — we can’t be what we are not. The answer, perhaps is to become more truly human, to become natural, to become nobody but ourselves.

  8. Jon Husband says:

    there is no point trying to persuade others unless they understand your frame or worldviewI wanted to add to that phrase as follows, but not sure that it changes anything (other than it is something I have noticed when trying to get people interested in my ideas).Sometimes it takes time and patience, aided and abetted by the scaffolding of understanding and meaning that dialogic processes enable (which take the time and patience ;-)”there is no point trying to persuade others until andunless they understand your frame or worldview”

  9. Dave Pollard says:

    Janene: On your first point, I think wolves really are nobody but themselves. They self-select into a pack, and they self-manage. The pecking ‘order’ is not a hierarchy or reflection of power, but of strength supporting need and vulnerability (nursing mothers and cubs eat first, not the alpha). As to your second comment, brava! “Creating your own choices” is an integral part of being nobody but yourself. Brilliantly put.My question to others is, Can you be nobody but yourself in civilization culture — is there still ‘room’ for this, and if so, how do we maximize, and find, that room? Do we need intentional communities that have as little social dissonance with our own views and selves as possible, to give us that room?

  10. Dave Pollard says:

    Jon: I like your addition. I wonder though whether (this is sure to get Dave Snowden to chime in) it is possible or should be necessary to persuade others of your point of view. Dialogue can help clarify our own and others’ views, and let us see where we agree and disagree, but I’m not sure that we really change our minds once they’re made up. We tend to form opinions on subjects based on the first information we get that resonates with our established personal worldview. Then additional information will entrench that opinion, or clarify it, but I don’t think it will change it to something that isn’t consistent with that worldview. Debate and dialogue may refine the design and construction of the upper floors, but we’re not about to go back and change the basement.The issue then becomes, Are our worldviews, our Lakoffian frames, our own, or are they (more likely) the rounded-off, shared, homogenized beliefs that make us everybody else? Would someone who is truly nobody but themselves have no worldview at all, and be completely open to, but untouched by, the beliefs and persuasions of everybody else? Or to stretch the basement analogy, when it comes to worldviews, are they ‘home-less’?

  11. Janene says:

    Hey Dave –I didn’t really think you would say otherwise re: wolves. But I *did* get that feeling from the essay… for whatever that’s worth ;-)RE: world view and changes each other’s minds… I DO believe that world view can change, although it is infrequent and difficult to live with. However, no one can *change another’s* world view. That being said, I think the value in dialogue is *acceptance* of others as they are (as opposed to change), and I think this is absolutely possible and desirable, once we get away from one right way thinking.

  12. Mariella says:

    I am not so sure about this….”Perhaps for the first few hours of our lives, we are all nobody but ourselves”…..newborns are so dependant to their mothers that it takes a long time until they beging to realize they are not their mothers. I can picture myself in this “nobody but ourselves” state of consciousness better in the dying moment … when I finally pass away…. it will be me with myself….

  13. Mariella says:

    …: Imagine you receive a brand new brain… absolutely empty….. and that you have to fill it up before replacing it with the one you are using now……… where will you begin..? data? feelings that give taste, color, scent, sound…. to your experience? what about unconscious data? ….. Will you change your current brain for the brand new one structured by your former brain? … what would you erase and what will you add…. —— ¿Have you ever seen an autistic person? In a certain way this people seem to be nobody but themselves…..?

  14. Doug Alder says:

    Would someone who is truly nobody but themselves have no worldview at all,

    Outside of a truly newborn child you are describing an impossibility there Dave. The acquisition of language, in and of itself, will impart a tainted view of the world as each language has it’s own inherent world views built in. It is inescapable.

  15. Jon Husband says:

    I am pessimistic about major change in mental models, mindset, worldviews until and unless ;-) something happens that cracks the frame, interrupts the personal patterns (as we know from the countless stories of major personal change after divorces, or illnesses or job losses .. the times when someone is forced, almost always by events external to themselves to begin much deeper (and usually very uncomfortable) reflection than they would ormally practice.This belief of mine is why I am pessimistic about the future of our world, notwithstanding a number of my IMO pollyanna-ish friends who insist that change happens one person at a time and so they are coaches or counsellors, etc.IMO, there are just too many people benumbed or perhaps asleep because their worldviews have been formed twenty or thirty or forty year ago when by and large the complexities and intractability of the dominant growth-insistent capitalist system did not seem nearly as foreboding or all-consuming .. and those who are not are by and large too poor or too marginalised / powerless in the face of the dominant mindsets to accomplish much real persuading.When the Tipping Point comes, if it does, it will probably be too late and may be more useful for just tipping us off the the edge of the abyss.I am not in a great mood today … you can probably tell ;-)

  16. Bharat says:

    I think in a superficial sense, this difference between “being nodoby-but-yourself” and “being conditioned by society” is known popularly as heart vs head. Your head/mind generally tries to conform to society but your “heart” (symbolically) represents something deeper, perhaps your true feelings.Re.. creating their own choices. Dave/Janene were implying that in current world it is not possible to create our own choices. Can you please give me a real-world example. I always like to think i have the freedom to choose whatever i want. If you are implying that some choices are not at all possible, what are they ? (I presume you are not referring to contraints of money which limits our choices. I think resource/technological contraints always exist in all socieites).Janene, you make an important distinction between “changing ones own worldview” and persuading others to change the worldview. I agree one can’t change the software in the others mind. But, one can perhaps ask/persuade others to *regonize* that they need to change their worldivew and ask them to work it out by themselves. I think it is possible to instill a need for worldview-change in others.Dave you said “The issue then becomes, Are our worldviews, our Lakoffian frames, our own, or are they (more likely) the rounded-off, shared, homogenized beliefs that make us everybody else? Would someone who is truly nobody but themselves have no worldview at all, and be completely open to, but untouched by, the beliefs and persuasions of everybody else? Or to stretch the basement analogy, when it comes to worldviews, are they ‘home-less’?”wow ! You hit the nail right on the head Dave. I now see what you are saying. What you seem to be getting at in this article is “Is it possible to be free of all past conditioning and live in the present moment completely”. I think your term “nodoby-but-yourself” kind of misrepresents your thought, because it kind of implies that you are closing yourself to outside world.But in fact, what you are (I think) suggesting is, can one be completely open to outside suggestions yet live free from their conditioning. I know of one man who i *believe* (again a belief, not a fact i *know*) lived in this state. That is Jiddu Krishnamurti (JK). Your quote above sounds very much like a leaf out of JK’s book. He encouraged people to go beyond all social/religious/political dogmas,doctrines,theories etc, and live in the present moment free from their conditioning. (I withdraw my recommendation the other day to read Yogananda or Sri Aurobindo. Both of them start from some presupposed theories, which i don’t think you’ll appreciate. JK’s works which are completely belief-free are available online at http://tchl.freeweb.hu/ ).Doug: Isn’t Language an artifact of thought ? So, if one goes beyond thought and lives for a moment in the space between thoughts, one is going beyond language ? That’s a meditative state and Dave’s nobody-but-yourself state at it’s extreme seems to be a meditative state. (JK advised people to go beyond theories and ideas, otherwise we just repeat words of others without experiencing it. And if lot of people repeat it, it becomes a dogma. So, I have to add a disclaimer that i have never experieced this state of silence till now and what i said is a mere intellectual argument. A mere repetition of an idea.)Thanks all for the discussion.

  17. Siona says:

    Wolves are not nobodies-but-themselves because they are not selves, and really, I’m not sure where all this railing against the human condition is going to get us. :) Infants are not nobodies-but-themselves either; they too lack any sense of what self-hood means. I imagine Dave might seriously consider abandoning his own self-awareness, but I would not; I value the poignancy of our existential dilemma, and would not trade it for all the unconscious Nowness in the world. (And I feel, wholly, that I’m nobody-but-myself. I don’t feel I need others to allow me the space to do this; I feel I can make that choice on my own. Perhaps I’m deluded. Perhaps I, like so many millions of others, am wholly a product of the system into which I was born. Still, I don’t feel the need to create an intentional community; as far as I’m concerned, this whole planet is one intentional community, and the challenge, as with any other IC, is learning how to get along and how to deeply BE with others. It’s a disarmingly large laboratory, perhaps, but I love it all the same.)Anyway.There seems something so sweet and desperate about this problem, though. We are not the only generation to have imagined itself to be in crisis, and we are not the only civilization that has thought that the fate of the planet was in our hands. What is it about human beings that makes us rather preach catastrophe than admit the more likely truth: that we too will die, that our generation will disappear as have so many hundreds of others before us, and that we too will be, in the end, forgotten? Why do we need to feel so important? There seems to me an almost endearingly naive narcissism at play. And Dave? This is an aside, but have you read Krakauer’s Into the Wild? It describes a young man who decided to head to the Alaskan wilderness to live an “unfiltered existence” and to “kill the false being within.” The book includes excerpts from Alex / Chris’s journals, and the introduction can be found here. It’s a short and very readable book; you might enjoy it.

  18. MLU says:

    A few thoughts:The more likely evolutionary path behind our social nature makes it even more fundamental: the mother/infant bond. We couldn’t develop those huge craniums–resulting in a need for years of protection while growing to maturity–without intense bonding–love. The evolution of humans is love based.To a large extent, we are taught feelings through social referencing. When confronting a scary new toy, a child looks first to the mother. If she looks afraid, he moves toward her. If she looks calm, he moves toward the toy. It is our increasing need to live among diverse peoples that causes greater stress rather than “pressure toward conformity.” We feel least pressure among kin and friends and increasing pressure as the differences between us and those around us increase. Finding common ground and common principles is the real challenge we face–increasing our unity by moving toward truth. How to love one another.Modernists tend not to like talk of truth because they confuse it with authoritarianism, but they know when they are lying–they can’t deny truth in any philosophically coherent way. The progress of science illustrates the progress of truth–away from diversity toward unity. The only community that will survive modernity will be the community of fellow seekers of the truth. The nearer they approach it, the less stress they will feel because they will be conforming not to social pressure but to their best understanding of reality.

  19. Janene says:

    Bharat: An example of a choice you cannot make? You cannot choose to stop working a job, paying for shelter, clothing, food…. oh wait… yes you can. It just requires a little more ingenuity to do than most *choices* people make. That was my point. Not that you *cannot choose* these things, but rather that most people (a) don’t have the imagination to even conceive of choices outside the system and (b) those that do, often believe that such choices are impossible to achieve. However, IMO, these sorts of choices will *define* the future of h. sapiens, if only because it is this extreme edge of creative people(with their loved ones, creative or not) that will investigate the many right ways….Would someone who is truly nobody but themselves have no worldview at all, and be completely open to, but untouched by, the beliefs and persuasions of everybody else?I don’t think so, Dave. I think that is where our linear, reductionistic world view impedes our creativity and vision… I think, really, that nobody-but-themself looks a whole lot like a happy, healthy, self actualized (who knew) and socially invested aboriginal person. Nothing magical… just all the pieces in place and working together…Truth… phooey. I’m not confusing it with authoritarianism, and I can *most certainly* deny there is any universal truth in this world. On what basis could such a thing be stated? How could anyone *know* that what they experience translates identically into another time and place? phooey!Janene

  20. Siona says:

    Janene? You’ve just proposed a universal truth. How can you be sure your experience of the absolute nature of relativism translates to anyone else? :) Further, given your proposed relativism, how can you apply culturally-bound terms like ‘self-actualized’ to someone in an aboriginal society? And a general question. Would someone who was nobody-but-themselves know that they were nobody-but-themselves?

  21. Janene says:

    Siona — That’s simply absurd. Lack of certainty can not be absolute… it’s just semantical games.I would guess — and that’s all I can really do — that ‘nobody-but-themself’ would be nonsensical to anyone that IS. After all, what would they compare against?

  22. Jon Husband says:

    We are not the only generation to have imagined itself to be in crisis, and we are not the only civilization that has thought that the fate of the planet was in our hands.This is probably a silly question, or point, but here goes …Prior to the invention of the telegraph, radio or telephone (to distribute information relatively quickly), how would any grouping more than maybe a regional community or at a stretch a nation be able to get any reasonable sense of the possibility that the planet or a global civilization might be in crisis ?Yes, I know that there were pamphlets and journals back when, and I know that stories and word of mouth travelled far and wide (over pretty long periods of time, I’d venture a guess) but given what we know of interpretations, filters and propaganda by ruling classes .. I have a hard time buying into the notion that other civilizations and past generations had a really clear sense that the fate of the planet may have been in their hands at the time.I suspect that most other civilizations or generations disussed the possible or probable fate of the planet in codified language, as in “Inshallah” or “the gods must be crazy”, or some such.

  23. This thing about adapting to the group is of course about survival – the group needs to function as a whole to survive. The best example in the mammal world are killer whales. they have developed “cultures” to be able to live where they do eg some living off seals, some eating small fishes, some hunting tuna. In these cases – playfulness adn experimentation, communication and group learning are all at the base of this culture development. so you could say that the difference, the play, the experimentation is important to learn new things – like when whales learned to follow fishing boats (equipped with sonar and after their food) and get there first. On the other hand learnign to act like a group is essential for survival.In Brave new world and brave new world revisited Aldous Huxley says the development of man moving to cities, being surrounded by a vast interconnecting system of technical infrastructure, was driving a development, albeit coming from the good purpose of ORDER, to turn people into insects Insects all act in exactly the same way and if they do not they get killed by the others. He sees civilisation as a giant termite stack of unhappy people.So I agree with you dave, it IS an important subject – it is not oil peaking or community gardens that will see manking through the next decade but development of a culture appropriate to the earth we live onour bodies in terms of organismsthe reason we are here

  24. Jon Husband says:

    BNW, Revisited (recently read) was a revelation for me. I agree with stephen’s point … given that I found Huxley’s musings (in effect a very robust footnote to BNW 25 years later) so very clearly thought out.

  25. Amanda says:

    “A dialogue in a medium that allows for effective communication between articulate people who have substantial shared context and understanding of each other’s worldview is about as close to intellectual and emotional nirvana as it gets.”This is what I want/want more of.

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