The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'products of the human imagination space colorful.'
The experience of being in the natural world is filled with punishments and rewards that guide behavior. Within our brains, positive and negative signals inform our decisions every step of the way. In the environment, fire punishes us for touching it and food rewards us for eating it. These kinds of lessons guided our evolution and are part of our deep programming.
The sometimes arbitrary rules of our social systems attempt to hijack this programming by manufacturing artificial punishments and rewards to control our behavior. This has benefits and drawbacks. At its best, it makes society more orderly. At its worst, it reduces us to interchangeable parts in a vast and inhuman machine.
All of our actions have natural consequences. But anthropogenic consequences are different. They're rarely natural and they teach no meaningful lessons. Oftentimes, they make no sense whatsoever. There are always people working to make the system more or less just according to whatever standard. But they rarely pause to consider the most important truth underlying the system with which they're engaged.
Our systems are not solid and immovable objects. Instead, our systems are choices. Choices made by multitudes every day. This doesn't mean that the people choosing to perpetually re-create these system are well informed. Most probably aren't, given all of the propaganda and censorship manipulating the pubic narrative. And yet, informed or not, they are responsible for their choices.
Social reality is contrived reality, in the same way that bedtimes are a reality invented for children by parents. At a basic level, all of our hierarchies and venerable institutions are little more than this kind of made up story. It is, of course, possible for us to scrap these stories for better ones at any point. How to actually do that isn't clear, but political subversives have been considering the matter for a very long time. Here's a quote from a Guardian article about scholar and anarchist Piotr Kropotkin:
Society, [Kropotkin] argued, could be run along the lines of the peasant communities he saw in Siberia, with their "semi-communistic brotherly organisation," free of domination by either the state or the market. And this, he insisted, was not mere nostalgia or utopianism, for new technology and modern agriculture would make such decentralised development highly productive. But Kropotkin was mindful, too, of the needs of the environment. ... He also rooted his anarchism in evolutionary science. Mutual Aid (1902) argued that communities founded on radical equality and participatory democracy were feasible because human nature was innately collaborative. Unlike Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer, who argued that all forms of life were driven by a competitive "struggle for existence" between organisms, Kropotkin insisted that another type of struggle was more important – between organisms and the environment. And in this struggle, "mutual aid" was the most effective means of survival.
Personally, I'd love to see large swaths of the economy and government replaced by self-organized federations and mutual aid networks. Maybe this will even happen someday. In the meantime, more and more people seem to be realizing that reality is contrived. The unraveling of covid lies may be accelerating this mass realization.
My personal sense is that this realization will soon reach a tipping point, beyond which many of the stories currently governing society will lose their power. Children eventually outgrow the contrived reality of bedtimes. Maybe we too will outgrow contrived realities like victimless crimes, rigged democracies, and corrupt systems. The first step in that direction is acknowledging that these realities aren't products of the natural world. They're products of the human imagination.
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