The Artificial Kingdom

Rugged individualism might be an appropriate expression for all the creatures in the world, with one exception. Humans have, in the last few hundred years, moved from being rugged individuals to our present state in which we have fashioned an alien environment in which we have become chess pieces or ciphers. We have invented the Artificial Kingdom where as Simone Weil once noted “it is the thing that thinks, and the man who is reduced to the state of the thing”.

I think that we, women and men, have become chess pieces. We have become objects to be manipulated by the market and the corporation. We spend our days like the chess piece; we have a quantified value and are placed on the board and used as desired by some one who may be a real person. The real person has still the human characteristics of creativity, spontaneity, improvisation, spontaneously reactive, discontinuous, a mosaic more than syntax or cipher. Just what we find is missing when using the telephone to contact someone out there.

In an effort to understand where we are now it might help to start back in time and move forward. In frontier days each person was very much an individual. Rugged individualism was a popular expression. Each man and woman was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Each husband and wife was a team that together could and had to do everything that was needed.

In early America we were an agricultural economy. Most families were farm families we were all rugged individualist. The farmer was very much the jack-of-all-trades and the master of his or her domain.

As we move forward in time we see this team become a man working in a factory or office and the woman was at home raising the children and maintaining the day to day necessities for all family members. She washed, cleaned, shopped, sewed, and was still much of a rugged individual. Slowly the man became a specialized worker in a clockwork factory or office.

Moving forward in history we arrive at the present moment where not only is the man working in the factory or office but the woman joins him there also.

When we examine the factory or office workspace we find a very different occupation for the man and woman than the rugged individualism of emerging history of human evolution. We no longer are masters of our own domain but are ciphers in a clockwork that functions upon modern economic principles.

A pertinent example of this mode of commodification is how we have converted what was political economics into the modern economics. Political economy is the study of social relations. It is the study of culture. Political economy focuses upon the problem of how to regulate industrialization within the context of a healthy society, it worries about the problems of labor within a context of the laborer as an end and not a commodity—an object of commerce.

Economics, however, in its modern form, has replaced political economics. Economics has removed the pesky concern about labor as being human and has replaced labor as being a commodity—an object of commerce. Modern economics is now the study of scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. Economics has legislated that labor as an end is no longer a legitimate domain of knowledge for economic consideration. In doing so, over time, society has become ignorant of such concerns. Our culture has replaced concern about humans as ends with humans as means to some other end.

In the rugged individualist mode of living the individual was creative and master even though the domain of mastery was small. An individual’s personality is dramatically effected. Labor has become an abstract quantity and calculated into the commodity produced. We are the only creatures who have completely removed ourself from what we were evolved to be. We are the only creatures removed from our grounding in an organic world. We came from a long ancestry of rugged individualist and now reside in the Artificial Kingdom. To what end only time will tell.

And in our society god forbid the individual.
Yes the individual is destroyed along with our Independence.
We are no longer men but economic slaves. Cattle to be herded and destroyed at the will of our masters.
Things will change.

What's your point?

Man has become specialised in certain tasks to be useful in a society. This has been the case not only for the entire duration of humankind, but also all other societies. This is because it's highly efficient.

To pick out one example of millions, a few meerkats out of many keep look out for predators while the others feed. Ants have even evolved so that their physical structure meets their needs to do their job in their society.

Bollocks to that. American society still required engineers, planners, mailmen, scientists, etc. otherwise they'd still be back-creek hillbillies, who have no idea what's causing the bunions to grow on their sixth toe.

Looking the big picture, nothing has really changed in society, except more advanced technology.

Burnt Toast

Toast

My point is that humans are the only creatues that have dramatically drifted far from its evolutionary roots. All other creatures are not so changed. The question is where does these changes take us. These changes come about almost automatically without forthought as to the consequences. Evolution has prepared us to be a certain kind of creature and now we are not that kind of creature any longer. We have become unquided missels.

if we've "evolved" from monkeys or what ever, why are there still unevolved species out there?

Hm, i wouldn't go as far as to speak as if i knew what we were evolved to be. Also you seem to speak as if we have stopped evolving and are ready to be whatever we should be.

We could still be evolving. If so then maybe the commodification is just another evolutionary step we are taking, because like a child that has no parents to provide guidance and warning about what is right and what is wrong we just have to stick our fingers in the wall outlet to find out if its good or bad.

That's how I see mankind, a child that has to stand up and live on its own.
Its quite obvious that this vision might lead people to seek religions, since all of them offer some sort of 'higher' being that serves as a role model for the followers, just like parents to a child.

I wonder if anyone knows the answer. The best we can do is guess I suppose, since gods are usually unresponsive and religions tend to make things up.

edit:

What I heard is that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, but I'm no expert.

What do you mean by unevolved? Did something just pop into existence on its original form lately?

Guest says---if we've "evolved" from monkeys or what ever, why are there still unevolved species out there?

Think of it as a bush (not the president) and it will make more sense. But of course getting a book and studying that is the best answer. People will give you different answers but you already are half way there because you have formed the question and the curiosity. Such matters are the most important component of learning in my book. They never taught us how to form questions in school and that can be the most difficult step to knowledge.

Lonk says--I wonder if anyone knows the answer. The best we can do is guess I suppose, since gods are usually unresponsive and religions tend to make things up.

No! The best we can do is not guess but to learn. We have this marvelous brain that is generally placed in neutral. Take that brain to your local library and the world awaits you. All you need furnish is the curiosity and the will.

Alright, there's several problems with your logic, I'll deal with them one at a time.

What does this even mean? Perhaps you mean to say that our environment has changed from whatever we did a lot of our evolving in. That's fair enough, but many other species have also adapted to change.

For example, the rats and seagulls which live on our waste products. Rabies virus and most other pathogenic diseases have also evolved to suit our and other species' changes of environment and lifestyle. It's not only humans that have changed.

Perhaps you mean that humans are actively changing the environment so that we have "drifted far from [our] evolutionary roots". Other species also do that. Algae can grow out of control and lead to deoxygenated waters. Helicobacter pylorii burrows into the mucosa of the stomach and produces urea to neutralise locally the acidic environment. On and on the examples go.

Please tell me what you actually meant by those statements, since they really don't hold up.

What specific changes are you talking about here?

Simply wrong. Evolution is not a progressive phenomenon bent on creating creatures of "higher beings" or towards a certain type of organism. It has not set us a path of anything. Evolution is a blind process that says "If you can have babies in this environment, go have more. If not, your lineage dies.".

Unguided, my arse. Natural selection occurs in all environments. Right now, due to the selective pressures that have been set up by the media and society, on average, the population will be come more skinny/beautiful, less fat and more athletic. Shows like CSI paint geeks as sexy, so the population might even become more scientifically-inclined, as well. We're still being "guided" even though you might not see it.


Burnt Toast

mostly right on:
Yes we are evolving, however we are not an active participant in this evolution process. In fact in some cases we are hindering our own advancement. Ie some diseases. Take for instance downs syndrome. a problem which perpetuates in a society that delays having children. on the other side we reduce diseases like Huntingtons disease. Educated individuals wait to have children or do not have any in exhange for careers. IE decreesing the frequency of inteligence from the gene pool. Then we also invent laws which prohibit commom sense from the gene pool. IE seat belts. As you can see multiple cases indicate that we have no idea how to inteligently drive forward our own evolution. However no matter what we do right or wrong concerning this event, it will happen independent of our best wishes. My person bet sees us in the far distant future feable and weak do to lack of activity.

funny.......i'm readin this when "where art thou brother" just came on a channel.so i'm watchin it with a fresh perspective.

Toast

For thousands of years humans lived a life with little or no change. With civilization changes were made but the drastic changes have been made in the last few hundred years. Very little in our life is similar to what it was for all of our evolution. Evolution is a long-term process and we have evolved little—thus we have adapted little. We live in an entirely different world now. Other animals are little effected. Of course the changes we have made tends to effect them externally but basically they are in the same world that they evolved in.

I think you might find McLuhan’s book “understanding Media” to be enlightening and interesting. He speaks about these matters with great insight.

You may only notice that we are living in different conditions because you experience them on a daily basis. But to say other animals are "little effected [sic]" is pretty much bull-toss.

For example, pathogenic bacteria in an antibiotic-rich environment (produced ever since the advent of penicillin) need to gain antibiotic resistance genes to survive. Quick adaption and evolution are needed in this case.

Rats and seagulls have changed physiologically to digest whatever we put in landfills.

I don't know what type of specific changes you refer to that makes you say that humans have "dramatically drifted far from its evolutionary roots", whereas other creatures haven't. There are no recent changes in the environment that I'm aware of that have affected humans more than any other species.

The bottom line is that I say bollocks to your ideas that say the human species as unique or special. I've had enough of the human arrogance that runs rampant through society.

Burnt Toast

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Comment to question:The artificial kingdom within our society, probably will occur.

This is because man as he is made, is far too dangerous, far to violent.

The win at any cost, without understanding our environment, has cost us all dearly.

The prognosticators, who encourage this, are the hidden Morlocks, of our desire.

Im with toast on this one, to me it seems you set too many things as 'obvious' constants
like saying 'we drifted from our evolutionary roots' and 'we are not the beings we were prepared to be'. I mean come on, for all we REALLY know (personal beliefs aside), we could be born to murder, steal and destroy(not what i believe but still possible).

We could be evolving into beings that change the envirorment to fit their needs.

And what about this? Learn what? Are there books that can tell me what we are really supposed to be or do(religion and other belief-based books aside)? Of course not, they will teach me how to make educated guesses basing myself on proven facts and theories, and those are still nothing more than guesses. What im trying to say is, there is no way for us to be sure of what awaits us further along the evolutionary path. We cant be sure but changing the world we live in means we are 'forcing' ourselves to evolve in a certain way doesn't it?