LoveSolution

Culture and the Technological Solution

(Disclaimer: I wrote this in something of a hurry, and it was the first thing I did this morning, so any typos are the result of morning amnesia and brain-farting.<3)

So I’m having a sort of discussion with the owner of this tumblr: http://hallucinatingtelepathicmovement.tumblr.com/

He had a recent post in which he spoke about anarcho-primitivism, and about culture being a “hindrance” to mankind and that anarcho-primitivists see that we ought to move away from culture, as opposed to embracing it.

I spoke to him about the cultural super-meme, and how I feel that it is generally a negative thing.  He responded back.  Rather than respond to him in the limited space of the “ask me a question” section of his blog, I figured I’d jot down a few quick thoughts for him here.

I think of the super-meme of culture as, generally speaking, to have evolved as a way to make distinctions between groups of people.  I see large memes, such as major religions, ways of dressing, sexual norms, ways of making war, etc, as being, more or less, uniforms that different societies have evolved into in order to do one main thing, which is to preserve their own genetic line.  Memes help us preserve our own genetic line by helping us identify who is “in” and who is “out” (generally speaking.)  It helps us identify who has the genetic line similar to those of our own, and thus should be helped, and who doesn’t have the genetic code and thus should not be helped, or in some cases, should be killed.  Culture, as such, is an extension of natural selection into a species that has free will and doesn’t necessarily follow all of the original “rules” of natural selection.

I see culture as being, as Terence McKenna put it, an “operating system” fixed onto our minds from a young age without our consent.  The operating system has many innocuous parts to it.  The gentleman I have been talking to mentioned “shaking hands” as a meme that he sees as innocuous.  I would agree that hand shaking is probably totally innocuous.  There are other large portions of cultures that are not, however innocuous, and most elements of cultures, or culture in general, can be seen as deliberately homogenifying, which I think is bad.  Diversity is our friend.  Culture takes away diversity by insisting that we as humans fit ourselves into certain fabricated gender roles, racial roles, and class stereotypes.

I see us relinquishing much of culture (we’ll talk about the “for instance” of gender roles) across the board, that we might find an end to things like bigotry toward homosexuals, women, and people who exist far outside of the sexual norm.  I see us relinquishing gender roles so that I might have an easier time, as a straight man, displaying my femininity (which is perhaps the best side of me) without being judged by some preposterous notion of masculinity.

I see us relinquishing culture because culture, generally speaking, seems to account for war.  Nature uses the super-meme to play different societies against each other (for instance, Christian societies and Muslim societies) for a very clear purpose: to speed up genetic selection through a process of violence.  Nature wants us to increase the death rate of those less capable through war while decreasing the death rate of the ones more capable with the spoils of war.  The “fit” carry on.  The “unfit” perish in droves.  I think that relinquishing the “operating system” which is imposed on us in the beginning allows us the capacity to look with greater compassion upon the way other people exist, and thus to let go of war.  

These may be relatively ephemeral terms.  I think that the main point is that a world where culture and its trappings were not imposed upon humans (the way militant Islam, evangelical Christianity, consumerism or the concept of gender roles are) would be a world in which humans could subvert the goal of nature and her super-memetic structures by not increasing the speed of our own genetic “paring down” with war.

Some of these modes of thinking are quite subjective and representational, but I will just say that I believe that memes that produce homogenization of a society while simultaneously driving that society to create plenty for itself to the detriment of others are the most successful memes (look at American consumerism) and thus they rise to the echelon of super-meme faster than memes like, say, a meme that implied the acceptance of all peoples and their right to exist in abundance, which would exist to the detriment of nature’s goal of driving evolution forward by slowing down selection.

When we shed the imposition of arbitrary culture, though, the problem will be: how do we continue to evolve without harming one another?

Technology will be the key.  Particularly, I propose this idea: that the internet is washing away the capacity of humanity to judge others based on their cultural trappings by, for the very first time since we wandered away from the cradle of civilization those thousands of years ago. For the first time, we are granted the ability to truly develop a sense of how all humans really are.  The internet has allowed me to self-educate at a rate which I think most people sixty years ago couldn’t educate themselves even in the finest scholarly institutions.  The internet also allows humans to express the things about them, as individuals, that they normally could not and would not have before, for fear that the various cultures they existed in would have reacted to their “true nature” with harsh judgment, ostricization, punishment or even murder.  

In that sense, the internet is giving us the very first true glimpse at our species.  I mean this in the sense that the internet washes away shame.  It makes it okay to admit things about ourselves that normally we tucked away and repressed as a result of cultural indoctrination.  The internet allows us to see objectively that all humans are unique, and certainly many, or even most, do not get forced into a set of cultural standards without having to repress themselves in some way.  The internet is the release valve for that repression, and is leading to that first beautiful true objective glimpse of ourselves as a super-organism.  Global self-knowledge.

On a personal level, I believe that to understand that human behavior is all subjective, and that morality is subjective, is to come to a place of purposeful universal love.  I had a revelation in my own life when I realized that all of my wrong doing as a person had been based not on some evil or incorrect force inside of me, but rather on my thinking based on a collection of crappy information and indoctrinated ideas up until the point of action.  I never ever woke up, on any given morning, and set about to do the opposite of what my experience and knowledge up until that point had told me was optimal.  Rather, right or wrong, I always set about to do the very best that I could that day for myself as a human based on all the previous thoughts and memories I had to that point.

I believe that, outside of the realm of crippling brain-maladies, this condition is true for all people.  The internet has taught me a large portion of that.  My ability to be exposed to so much knowledge and so many view points and so much diversity through the web has led me to one conclusion: human behavior is all subjective.  

I do not believe that I could judge and hate someone if I could experience their frustrations, fears, experiences, and thoughts running across my own mind as if they were my own.  The internet makes this nearly possible in some ways, and I believe that advances in neurobiology, nanotechnology and computing technology will in fact allow me, one day soon, to plug my mind into a computer, and then into another human’s, and to allow my thoughts (including every single one of my truest insecurities, all of my secrets, all of the desires and fears I’m afraid to articulate) to pass across another person’s mind’s eye as if my mind was their very own.  After a period of experiencing this, I believe that any other human could only look upon me with profound love and empathy, as they would have seen the objective truth: we are all scared little boys and girls, sometimes.  We all lust.  We all crave attention and acknowledgment.  We all want to be accepted.  We are all, beneath the culture uniform (which demands that we hide our insecurities, fears and deep affections,) creatures who long for love and connectedness.  We are of the same kind.  

Technology will allow us to share our consciousnesses with one another in this way.  Even if it doesn’t have a “Matrix style,” “wire in the brain” quality to it, the internet still grants us, if used properly and dispersed farther, the ability to learn the nature of other humans in this way.

When we have all come to a place of true love and understanding of the human condition, a mode of living like anarcho-communism will blossom naturally, because no “government” will be necessary for one man to look compassionately upon another and want to help lift him up.  Economic disparity, for once, will fade away, not because the tax man had to coercively redistribute one man’s riches to another, but because the rich man will realize that he has over extended himself into a world in which all he really needs is companionship and love.  He will relinquish his tight hold on his fortune, of his own accord.

I want to live on a farm with a high-speed satellite-internet hook up.  I want there to be a series of large tee-pees on that farm to sleep in, in addition to a big building or a series of small houses where I can live and others can live.  I want the farm to have some cows and chickens and I want to grow delicious food and to share it with people and I want there to be solar panels and a well so that there will be water.  And there should be lots of loud speakers and pot plants.  

I like my new friend, and his blog, and the conversation his blog post about anarcho-primitivism has prompted.  I judge no person.  I love all persons.  Check out this guy’s tumblr.  It is cool.  He’s onto something with his writing and life. :-)

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