Bonding With Strangers

What makes a society? The answer to that question seems to be so easy: people make up a society. That's true, of course, but unfortunately, or I should say fortunately that answer is incomplete, it's missing the component eluded to in the title of this post.

When we still lived in and as tribes, our society was made up of people we knew personally, and this is how we've lived for tens of thousands of years. We've evolved the basics of moral and social rules by which society is held together in an environment where all faces, all names and all personalities were known to each and every member of tribal society. This is how we conquered the rest of nature; our ability to work together, communicate and organize, has given us our place on top of all food-chains. Only by working together we were able to defend against predators that were individually much faster and much stronger than any single human being. As individuals we're kind of pathetic compared to saber-tooth tigers, mammoths, lions or gorillas.

By giving up on our nomadic tribal society and transforming into a much larger one that settles in villages and cities, we've learned that the bigger the society, the more minds and bodies contribute to sustaining that society, we are able to multiply the output in the form of food, housing and anything else needed, by orders of magnitude never before seen. The problem was, and still is, that we now didn't know every face, name and personality anymore; the unwritten rules that bonded the familiar faces in tribal society were thus replaced by written rules that bonded the largely unfamiliar faces in the new society. This transformation has been, I dare to hypothesize, our species' single largest step forward. A tribe can't build a cathedral or a factory, now can it? That takes thousands of minds and bodies.

If we follow that train of thought, we realize that everything we've ever accomplished has been accomplished through our ability to meaningfully organize and work together in ever larger and larger groups. We realize that no individual can make even something as simple as a pen or a mouse, let alone a rocket. We should also realize that there are no heroes; Elon Musk didn't design or build "his" magnificent space-faring toys, he's not our real life Tony Stark. "His" toys, in the end, belong to all of us. But we've unfortunately bought in to the ideas of individualism and hero-worship so much, that saying so will make many people angry; they'll say that I'm jealous of Elon, or that I'm trying to steal from him that which is rightfully his. Well, that's the problem with the rules we've written to replace the unwritten rules of the tribe; those rules were written by the few individuals who had every incentive to make their rules apply to the individual instead of to society, to the collective of bodies and minds that all contribute to the furtherance of the human experiment.

All the written rules we've ever had, be they based on a religion or a kingdom or capitalism, always were to the benefit of the one or few individuals at the top of our organized societies. And "the top" has always been an expression of the amount of material goods gathered in the hands of those individuals. And those individuals at the top have an invested interest to always divide us, to always make us believe that achievements are made individually, to always have us fight among each other as to steer us away from the truth that only united and organized as a collective we've been able to conquer the planet and will be able to conquer space eventually. And never before have we had a set of rules as divisive as capitalism. Never before has the truth been reversed as effectively than with this system that elevates the individual above anything else. Never before was it so easy for those at the top to unite sub-divisions of society around ideas that separate them from other sub-divisions, and make them stick like glue to that fake and incomplete unity. We've seen this recently in the storming of the Capitol by the lost souls who found a sense of belonging and strength in numbers by joining the cults of Trump and QAnon.

The success of our modern society depends on our ability to bond with total strangers, while knowing and feeling that evolution only gave us the instincts to bond in small tribes. So we need to organize, but not in the way we do it now; we need to organize in a way that does justice to the truth of strength in numbers. The truth that alone we're worth nothing. The truth that Elon Musk is not a hero, and neither is Trump, for there are no heroes. Or we're all heroes. Socialism approaches these truths best, and capitalism is a complete negation of them. Capitalism produces the capitalists that are the replacement of the kings and emperors of yesteryear and whom command the same sort of worship. The anarcho-capitalists who want to minimize government or abolish government strive for, knowingly or unknowingly, a return to the small tribal communities where only unwritten rules are effective. Just listen to them debate and you'll hear them actively advocate for small communities, while they throw their trust behind the "free market" to provide some semblance of a just equilibrium; they actually believe in the presence of an Invisible Hand where there is none. This is a sad sight to behold if you ask me.

Bernie Sanders worded it well during some of his rallies during the Democratic primaries; he asked people in the crowd to look around them and then asked if they were willing to fight for those strangers around them. Where anarcho-capitalists will say that taxation id theft, smarter minds will say that taxation is just a tiny admission to the fact that we are a society, a willingness to contribute to society as a whole, including its weakest members. Those at the top of our capitalist society landed at the top precisely because they don't want to fight for or bond with the strangers that make up the society that made them rich... Well, that's enough for this little rant. I'll leave you with an interview with Richard Wolff in which he discusses how the storming of the Capitol last Wednesday is yet another symptom of capitalism in decline, and this wise quote by Karl Marx for you to ponder on:

"The leading ideas of any age, are the ideas in the leaders of that age."

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